I feel I should have something to say about the phone-in scandal. Something strident and stentorian; something clear and wise, with just a twist of wry. But, for the life of me, I don’t. Whatever my opinion is, it’s still on hold behind a whole lot of other opinions, and by the time it gets to the head of the queue, nobody will be listening. What’s been surprising about all this is that grown-up, sensible folk appear to be shocked, or at least surprised, that premium phone lines are run with a haphazard, lazy greed by the Tristrams. Why would anyone think that calling a daytime programme to answer the multiple-choice question “Is the capital of France Belgium, Tesco or Paris?” is going to be regulated by the Electoral Reform Society or the UN or anyone else, or that the show had anything on its mind except separating morons from as many quids as possible? Who really, honestly thought that when you text or press the red button to evict some sad act from some desperate competition, it is any more than a format device and a cash grab? The name of the only interactive game on the box is We Say, You Pay.

Your television is getting paranoid. It thinks you’re out to get it, that you’re going to turn its littlestandby light out. It’s full of conspiracy theories at the moment. Last week, it offered us Adam Curtis’s The Trap (Sunday, BBC2), the first of three fabulously nutty conspiracy films. Most conspiracies just stick to one event, but this one was a great big joined-up conspiracy: the John the Divine of conspiracies, the complete, unified alternative explanation for everything, a modern revelation that everyone is out to get everyone else. It was compulsively weird as a programme. We saw a montage of random, fuzzy images designed to induce feelings of unspecified unease or aimless anxiety — a bit like a Radiohead video — that had only passing relevance to the voice-over, which was a lapel-grabbing, locked-ward lecture of ever more convoluted theories about secret cabals of mathematicians and right-wing accountants’ think-tanks manipulating the globe. Altogether it had that moreish, slippery conviction and confetti of hyper-real detail that are the proofs of a really good conspiracy.

It would have been completely compelling if it hadn’t been based on the thoughts of that mad bloke Russell Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind, and of RD Laing, the shagging psychiatrist. Laing was a fashionable Hampstead joke 20 years ago, an egomaniac with an enormous chip. The thought that his dinner-party chat-up lines and glib, glossy-mag hypotheses should come back to rule the world was more than I could swallow. Still, it was engrossing, in a bonkers sort of way, and I expect would have been popular in student-union bars with the urban anthropologists and media-studies bods.

Two dramas took on kidnapping children with a nasty gusto last week, from very different national perspectives. The helpfully titled Kidnapped (Tuesday, C4) was a brutal American good guy/bad guy drama that started with a poor-little-rich-kid grab. In a typically Yankee TV way, nobody seemed to be terribly upset, just increasingly furious. The cast was the usual clutch of clenched fists, granite jaws and gravel-voiced toughs, who all snarled at each other and, as Dorothy Parker put it, ran the emotional gamut from A to B. It’s a rule of hard-boiled American drama that rich victims are always unsympathetic. Their wealthy lives are empty, miserable, dysfunctional and lonely, which always makes me think that the greatest revenge they could inflict on the kidnappers would be to let them have all the money and watch them get miserable. The good thing about Kidnapped was that you could enjoy the suspense and the violence and the gravelly snarling without ever having to commit to caring about what happened to any of the participants. I think that at the moment all American drama is a metaphor for their foreign policy.

Fallen Angel (Sunday-Tuesday, ITV1) couldn’t have been a more different style of kidnap. Money never entered into it. It was all terribly English and to do with the past and religion, repression and secrets, and possibly gardening and cutting the top off your boiled egg instead of tapping it. I’m not entirely sure. The first of three consecutive episodes was perfectly beastly, in a Miss Marple-meets-Rosemary West kind of way. A small girl was stolen from her childminder by Emilia Fox and the comic bloke from the bank ads. As an evil duo, they were an unlikely pairing, coming perilously close to being a cute Cruella de Vil and comedy henchman, though Fox did have quite a nice line in smiley, repressed nutter’s anger. It’s funny how psychos are always so much scarier when they’re pretty girls.

Charles Dance was the most unconvincing vicar since Dawn French. He is looking more and more like someone staring out through a flayed Charles Dance mask. The eyes don’t seem to belong to the rest of the face, but then the performance doesn’t seem to belong to the script, or anyone else in shot. Fallen Angel was only slightly nastier than the usual Sunday-night snoring village crime, and I’m not sure the first episode had the drama or tension to carry it over the next two nights. Once again, this is ITV putting too much money and resources into a showy production when what it really needs is to get its small repeat business in order. We want regular dates, not big events.

Two programmes last week dealt with historical anniversaries: the independence and partition of India, and the banning of the slave trade. Both subjects are fraught with retrospective guilt and corrective revision, and both these films were embarrassingly and infuriatingly dreadful, in ways that are emblematic of television’s craven need to make the past personal and manageable. In The Last Days of the Raj (Monday, C4), India was dramatised so that it ended up looking like an edition of Neighbours from Hell — the momentous and the moving made trivial and embarrassing. And the slaves got the unfocused, lachrymose empathy of Moira Stuart in Search of Wilberforce (Friday, BBC2), because television believes complicated and contentious subjects are best filtered through an amateur celebrity presenter, to make them watchable and to deflect responsibility. It did nobody any service. Wilberforce got faint, damning praise and the anonymous slaves were further obscured by a lot of emotive clichés and righteous tooth-sucking. This was like a dull edition of the holiday programme Wish You Weren’t Here. The abolition of the slave trade was a remarkable moment in the political, social, commercial and religious history of this country. This weepy hand-wringing didn’t begin to explain it or do it justice.

These were two irredeemably poor documentaries. Half a dozen strands can make sophisticated and watchable programmes about conspiracy twaddle and current affairs, but nobody will take a grown-up look at the creation of India and Pakistan or the cessation of the slave trade. You don’t have to be any sort of conspiracy theorist to see that both had enormous consequences for the way we live now.

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