Storyline: Losing My Sense, BBC1, 10.35pm;
Marbella Belles, itv1, 10pm

As a real-life record of one man's response to his increasing loss of visual sensation, the latest Storyline documentary from BBC Scotland reflected its subject's own stoicism by being, well, non-sensationalist, and eschewing any hint of tabloid overstatement.

Losing My Senses profiled the silent life of 34-year-old Stephen Joyce, profoundly deaf since birth and now losing his sight following the onset of a retinal disorder. Having grown up with an acceptance of his lack of hearing, Stephen is now embracing the onset of blindness with the same stately calm.

As the training manager for Deafblind Scotland, charged with informing the fully sighted and the non-deaf about deafblindness, Stephen has a unique notion of the very separate kind of life that lies ahead for him. Thankfully, as Losing My Senses established, he has always been his own person: a man in charge of his own destiny.

Stephen's lifelong management of his own deafness - nay, his outright ownership of his own deafness - has generally been a great asset, although he recalled with some embarrassment the time he rejected a supermarket sales assistant's energetic hands-on guidance in a supermarket when he'd asked him where the curry powder was. Finding himself being led by the arm in what he knew to be the opposite direction to the spice shelves, Stephen began remonstrating - only being halted when the shop assistant grabbed a cardboard box and hastily scrawled a single word on it: "Fire". He was the last one to be evacuated from the store.

He now takes a similarly matter-of-fact approach to the enveloping blindness which, to adopt his positive-minded terms, is going to amend his relationship with his sighted four-year-old son, Cameron. "I just don't know how long my sight will last," Stephen told us. "I want to see my son grow up to see his development. I want to be able to see him get his results from school, play football but I might not."

A remarkably low-key and unsentimental programme, Losing My Senses spurned all facile melodrama in quietly telling its tale, and was thus all the more inspirational. Indeed, when life next throws an obstacle in your path, no matter how apparently major, think of Stephen Joyce's steadfast progress towards whatever lies ahead of him and vow to walk in his footsteps. (NB: he's going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro while he still can.) Marbella Belles was inspirational in a drastically different way. Having watched it, I felt inspired to visit the sunny Spanish seaside resort - a self-styled "millionaires' playground" - with a view to offending as many of its residents as I might be able to insult ("Repent, you frightful jades!") before being apprehended by the local Guardia Civil.

For Marbella Belles is peopled entirely by squawking, dyed-blonde, fake-tanned English slatterns with no taste and more money to spend on vulgar shoes than most of us would get through in a lifetime.

Take Essex woman Lisa - right now, please, and don't come back with her! Lisa flippin' swears like a flippin' trouper; flippin' cackles like flippin' Sid James; spends all day having her nails done; and puts her fags out on other folk's marble floors.

Lisa bought a £2000 Pucci dress and split it up the side the first time she wore it in public. But Lisa don't care. Lisa can always buy anavvah, just like Lisa can hire a second Filipino housemaid to keep her baby away from her in the mornings when she's a bit fragile-feeling.

Marbella Belles: you'll feel soiled for watching it, but it'll also make you feel good for having more brains than money, and not the other way round.