My local paper had promised a Sunday night programme called Fallen Angle. Something about geometry or shoddy buildings? Fallen Angel (ITV1) turned out to be a drama starring Emilia Fox as Angel, who had kidnapped the little girl of a newly ordained vicar and her police-detective husband. She kept planting ecclesiastical clues accompanied by body parts but thankfully this didn’t lead to the abattoir Gothic of Messiah. Instead, tonight and tomorrow’s episodes will leap back decades to feature more of her cleric father (Charles Dance) and unravel why Angel grew up into the present-day murderer we saw last night.

Knowing this helped to offset the dissatisfaction with the sketchy characterisation and leisurely pace of the opening episode. It was like watching a stall being laid out with the best buys held back. It also needed a fill-the-gaps narration by the policeman’s mother (Clare Holman) that sometimes sounded like a po-faced Desperate Housewives voiceover. Yet this opener did score with the genuinely creepy interplay between Fox and Mark Benton as her simple-minded housemate battling paedophile urges. Fox could bully or beam brightly with the steely stare of someone you knew kept severed hands in the freezer. And with a fine cast it still looks promising. I only hope that it doesn’t all simply boil down to Angel not having had enough love as a child.

Also laying out its store was Adam Curtis’s The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (BBC Two). Having previously asserted in The Power of Nightmares that the threat of terror was an exaggeration by US conservatives and Islamists, he now contended that our leaders’ concept of freedom has led to a less free society. For Curtis, the roots of their ideology lie in Cold War game theory that identified the motivating force for individuals and society as self-interest. The mathematician John Nash then calculated an inevitable equilibrium being reached in which everyone’s self-interest was perfectly balanced against each other.

Never mind that Nash (played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind) had wrestled with paranoid schizophrenia for years. His theory chimed with free-market economic thinking and inspired nascent Thatcherites. So, says Curtis, Tory thinking created a culture of government-set targets to allow self-serving civil servants and public-sector workers to achieve Nash’s equilibrium for the benefit of everyone. How this view of human nature as a cold, calculating machine has since curtailed our freedoms presumably becomes clearer in the next two episodes.

Years ago, a programme like this would simply have had the kind of stiff, bushy-bearded lecturer with a blackboard that we see on Sam Tyler’s 1970s telly in Life on Mars. Curtis now offers a stream of ideas with interviews (it was remarkable to see the elderly Nash) and archive footage and music used more for mood than illustration. Beehived dancers looked blank. Corridors ranged from missile silos to NHS wards. Cult movie soundtracks such as Assault on Precinct 13 provided menace.

If this series had been one of yesterday’s Crufts finalists, it would have fared better in the agility contest than the Obedience World Cup. It indulged in the kind of conceptual leapfrogging that brought in the psychologist R. D. Laing and his views of the family as another oppressive institution of the self, and American psychiatry that categorised people as mad if they didn’t fit into checklist standards of normalcy.

All this, Curtis was saying, has fed into an overarching ideology of freedom. But in giving us a narrative of ideas, it was hard to see the causal connection between these ideas and the wider social and political changes around us. It occasionally reminded me of the 1970s James Burke series Connections. One moment he’d be on a rollercoaster musing on the nervous system, the next in an igloo talking about insulation with the connection between the two lost. Nonetheless, The Trap makes seductive viewing — it’s almost like an ambient documentary, Brian Walden remixed by Brian Eno.

“There’s not another species for a billion miles that can make itself scared. We think too much!” declared a neurologist in 3 Lbs (BBC One). This new US medical series set in the neurosurgery unit of a New York hospital — the title refers to the weight of the brain — is basically made up of transplanted organs from House, Grey’s Anatomy and the inside-the-body son et lumiere of CSI. But its lead-surgeon hero (Stanley Tucci) is not quite a hand-holder nor truly mean and this opening episode ended up like its 3lb subject — simply sitting there, convoluted, grey and mushy.

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