Great Ormond Street (BBC2, 9pm)

LIKE the parents of many other disabled children, I can tell you we wish we could go through the pain of operations that little ones face to improve or extend their lives.

So I'm not sure why I should be sitting through it all again in the third series of Bafta-nominated documentary Great Ormond Street (GOSH) as once again doctors and families navigate life-changing decisions in treating the country’s most poorly children.

A youngster worth watching is 14-year-old Jess, an intelligent teenager with cystic fibrosis who turned down the chance of a lung transplant at the age of 11 because she felt she wasn't ready. Now she faces a life-or-death decision regarding the same procedure. Astonishingly, while 50 years ago all children with immune deficiencies would have died, about 90 per cent will now survive thanks to the clinical research and experimental treatments being pioneered at GOSH and other paediatric centres.

GOSH is also one of the largest children’s heart and lung transplant centres in Europe. Tonight's episode, Fight To Breathe, follows four children with serious respiratory conditions and their families as they make the difficult decision of whether to join the lung transplant list. Jess' condition is deteriorating but she bravely says: "I wanted to make the decision myself, so that if anything was to happen, my parents wouldn't blame themselves."

Meanwhile, nine year-old Charlie, who also has cystic fibrosis and is preparing for a transplant, has a long list of questions for his doctor, including how long the donor lungs will last. A transplant could offer the four children a vital second chance at life, but a shortage of donors means the average wait for a lung transplant is a year, and 25 percent of patients will die while they are waiting. The three-part series is focusing on children with rare diseases, respiratory and neurological conditions, as clinicians and nurses push the boundaries of paediatric medicine to try and save the lives of their young patients where conventional treatments have failed.

Bobby Gaspar, consultant in Paediatric Immunology at GOSH, says: “Difficult decisions are part of daily life at Great Ormond Street. This documentary offers a rare insight into what it is like for us as clinicians and researchers, as well as for our families and patients, as we weigh up what is right for each child and the amount of risk we are willing to take to give that child a chance of life, or a better quality of life. In a lot of cases, we are treating children who have already run out of conventional treatment options. So our clinical research and experimental treatments often represent the very last chance for a child to get better – and the results can sometimes be extraordinary.”

Botched Up Bodies (C5, 10pm)

EACH edition features people who have attempted to change their appearance. They've managed too – but not in the manner they had originally hoped. These are the tales of cosmetic surgery gone horribly wrong, and some of the footage that appears here isn't for the faint-hearted, so be warned. Among those included in the first programme is former IT consultant Vishal, who wanted to have his nostrils narrowed in an attempt to make his nose smaller – instead, he now has virtually no nose at all and must breathe through a tube. Property manager Heidi wanted excess skin removed after losing weight, but ended up with hideous scars.

Virgin Atlantic: Up in the Air (ITV, 9pm)

MANY bosses of massive companies remain faceless to the people who buy their products or use their services, but not Richard Branson. He's instantly familiar to pretty much everybody – he even appeared in a James Bond film. In this week's edition of the fly-on-the-wall documentary series, he's visible again, this time as he shoots a range of adverts for Virgin Atlantic in Florida – and for Meigan, the airline's new director of communications, being on set gives her a chance to meet Branson for the first time.

Viv Hardwick