One minute you’re on the phone, arguing about the essence of marital fidelity and imminent financial hardships, the next your wife has been kidnapped by a Bosnian flower-seller, your children abducted by paedophiles, your world turned upside down by the fuzz, and everyone you know seems to be staring poignantly into the middle distance, weeping in stoic slow-mo at the existential emptiness of it all, while bathetic mood music plays lightly in the background.

Such is the harrowing fate to befall Matt Wellings (David Oyelowo) in the first part of the kidnap miniseries Five Days (BBC One). The show, a snappy ensemble police procedural with a melodramatic undertow, is a prestige co-production between the BBC and the US cable giant HBO, the same award-winning duo behind Band of Brothers, Rome and Tsunami: The Aftermath. And indeed, for a great chunk of the first episode there was a thematic intensity and storytelling élan on display that typically befits the production powerhouses behind it.

Here a cavalcade of characters, some jaded, some anxious, drifted through frame and past each other, coolly unaware of their soon-to-be interconnected fates. Among them were the troubled Detective Inspector Iain Barclay (Hugh Bonneville), young mother and kidnap victim Leanne Wellings (Christine Tremarco), worrywart granny Barbara (Penelope Wilton), and tough nut female sergeant Amy Foster (Janet McTeer).

Most of these characters, it slowly transpired, were hiding something pivotal about themselves — to be revealed, no doubt, in episodes two to five. And as the director Otto Bathurst piled on the atmospherics, including disquieting use of CCTV footage and eerie blue-lit shots of empty roads, Five Days soon began to speak of a modern, emotionally disconnected Britain, full of alienated strangers, in much the same way that Paul Haggis’s Oscar-winner Crash spoke about a psychically fractured LA.

The demands of dramatic momentum are merciless, however, and once the kidnap investigation got under way Five Days floundered. The need to offer the viewer a comforting soupçon of hope led to an early and frankly incredulous recovery of Leanne’s missing son, while the show’s pop-philosophical tendency towards “meaningful” scenes of teary-eyed despair was repeatedly undercut by some extremely blunt writing. Foster, the hardboiled female cop, for instance, a ripe Jane Tennison/Prime Suspect parody, surveys a gang of first-time forensic staff and announces with needless expository zeal: “That’s what happens when they send a proper search team off on yet another training exercise. We end up drowning in d***heads!”

I’m not too sure about Hardeep Singh Kohli. The comedian and self-styled Sikh Liberace is writing and presenting a new documentary series called £50 Says You’ll Watch This (Channel 4). Now, the ostensible subject of this series is gambling and its apparent apocalyptic stranglehold on contemporary culture. Yet for anyone who watched even the first ten minutes of the show, stuffed with faux intense scenes of Kohli gambling, sighing, sweating and mugging to camera, it became obvious that the real subject of Kohli’s series is Kohli himself.

The gambling analysis was never going to fly. Kohli wheeled on a social anthropologist who said that gambling was a bad thing, a neurophysiologist who said that it was a chemical thing, and then off he went to Vegas to “explore” gambling with his own allegedly precious and much-needed £7,000 flutter budget. This was, of course, just an excuse to get the flamboyant Scotsman, complete with lilac turban and cream suede loafers, out there among the gambling fraternity in an attempt to spark some quirky conversational entertainment.

The real kick here, of course, is that Kohli may be his own favourite subject, but he’s also a difficult subject. Not a natural interviewer by anyone’s standards, his default setting is a pursed hang-dog stare that aims to project befuddled innocence but can barely conceal a certain self-possessed froideur. Without the empathetic wiles of a Broomfield, a Moore or even a Theroux, Kohli can often reduce the most innocuous interview situation to a tense stalemate, as he does with a dimwit Novelty Gambler in Las Vegas. Or he can scupper it altogether, as in part two of the series when he implodes at a poker table, simply because he is unable to connect with those around him.

In this way, surprisingly, he is much like the dead-eyed protagonists of Five Days — busy, quirky and ostensibly living, but hiding at the heart the symptomatic alienation of the modern condition. Only without the tears.

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