By Sian Brewis

Mum Lauren has three kids aged five and under, and is finding the pace of it all a bit hard. After all, she is 63. Every morning, she downs an array of pills to keep her energy levels up. The bottles and pill packets take up half her kitchen table top, as she counts them out with arthritic, gnarled fingers.

"Curcumin – that's the spice in curry – arthomax anti-inflammatory, vitamin E, vitamin K, Vitamin D3. Co-enzyme Q10."

I'm sure the last one's in moisturiser.

Lauren pours all of them into a cup and turns to the camera, confessing: "Sometimes I have to take a break, so I can get them all down."

Meanwhile Sue, 59, mum of 18-month-old Freya, loves motherhood so much she wants another. Doctors are less keen on giving her another round of IVF. One expert tries to explain to her the health risks but she shakes her head and smiles. "I've got bundles of energy, I think it would be slightly different."

The programme cuts to her in a gym, huffing and puffing. She's had a benign brain tumour, we learn, her hearing's not what it was and her knees have gone.

Too Old To Be a Mum? (BBC 1, 10.35pm) was absorbing, if uncomfortable, telly. The question raised in the title was never answered. But the prospect of them popping their clogs hung over everything like a baby's mobile over a cot.

"We hope Sue lives a nice... life," says Maggie, Sue's mother-in-law and no spring chicken herself. The unspoken word there, I suspect, is long.

Lauren's arthritis means she can't look after the children without help. Her much younger husband – they met at Latin dance classes – does most of the childminding.

Is it, Lauren was asked, selfish to have children now?

"Without me, they wouldn't exist. And most people don't think, 'gee, I wish I didn't exist'."

Sue, a jolly, practical woman, had always wanted a family but spent her life caring for her parents. By the time they died, her biological clock must have been ticking like a time bomb.

She had three goes at IVF and thought it hadn't worked. When she started putting on weight, her doctor said it was probably ovarian cancer. She only realised it wasn't when she had a scan. "Congratulations," said the medic, looking at the screen. Sue still thought she was ill: "I thought, 'that's an odd thing to say to someone with cancer'."

Apart from her health, the only downside has been people's reactions. She left one playground after other mums made pointed comments about her age.

We leave her in Italy, where she's headed to find a more sympathetic doctor. "I have the right as any woman does to have a child – to pursue the dream. I just wish people wouldn't judge me for that."