Alex Best: My Life With George (C4): Trouble At The Top (BBC2): My life was a total soap opera at that point," confessed Alex Best as the saga dubbed BestEnders by the tabloids rumbled on.

Although one of the quieter jungle residents in I'm A Celebrity, the footballer's wife offered a few thoughts on life with George Best round the camp fire.

This well-timed documentary attempted to tell the full story, through Alex's video diary and the film crew that followed her during the months her marriage to Best fell apart.

His problem was simple enough to diagnose. He was an alcoholic womaniser 25 years her senior. He fell off the wagon after a liver transplant. He was unfaithful, with evidence provided by various blondes selling kiss-and-tell stories to the tabloids. He hit his wife and he smashed up her car.

Her behaviour was just as predictable. She said their marriage was over and left him. She went back to him. Then she said their marriage was over and left him. She went back to him. It was like groundhog day as the same pattern of events happened time and time again.

Only witnessing his indiscretions finally convinced her the marriage was over. She went round the house of Gina, who claimed to be pregnant by him. She denied Best was there. When Alex went to use the bathroom, she found him in a bedroom. She left him again. "Is that it?" asked the interviewer. "Yes," replied Alex.

Of course, it wasn't. He turned up on Christmas Day and beat her. She refused to press charges, blaming his actions on the fact that it was the first Christmas they hadn't been together.

She agreed to do the programme to tell her side of the story and help build her career in the media. As her first TV interviewing job was talking to the cast of Footballers' Wives, you wondered how seriously people are going to take her. Considering George's treatment of her, you wondered why she hadn't shouted I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of My Marriage! earlier.

Trying to keep Best off the booze seems a lost cause and so, I imagine, is Stelios Haji-Iaonnou's bid to introduce cheap cinema tickets to this country. What worked in other parts of the easy empire, such as easyjet, is more difficult to implement in the movie business because of terms demanded by distributors.

Trouble At The Top told how Stelios wanted to sell tickets as cheaply as 20p, but it was costing him £1.30 a seat for the right to show films. Distributors won't give him first-run movies to show in his Milton Keynes easyCinema.

You had to admire his persistence as he put on an orange sandwich board and handed out leaflets at the shopping centre. He even tried to drum up publicity outside the nearby rival cinema. Now he's trying legal action to force distributors to give him blockbuster movies, which is as likely as George Best staying off the wagon.

Published: 13/02/2004