TELEVISION / There is no need to adjust your mind-sets

I was looking forward to catching up with Adam Curtis's The Living Dead (BBC2). After all, one of my colleagues had described it, before transmission, as "the most important documentary series of the year", while another, after transmission, had declared that it was "pernicious". This seemed rather promising - controversy isn't the infallible sign of merit some people seem to think, but for a film-maker to divide viewers so categorically suggested that the programmes at least wouldn't be bland. They aren't but, having watched two of them now, I find myself falling between two stools as to their merits.

Curtis wasn't done any favours by the extravagant praise. Having been promised the best thing since sliced bread, you worked your way through the undoubtedly stylish packaging to find... sliced bread, a statement of the obvious wrapped up as a lone cry in the wilderness. Curtis's case in "On the Desperate Edge of Now" was that historical accounts of the war had substituted a fairy-tale for the truth, a well-meaning lie in which the combatants of the Good War slayed the dragon of Nazism.

Unfortunately he made his assault on simplification with some startlingly crude simplifications of his own. "The Americans had come into the war determined to put an end to European barbarism." Oh, had they? I don't think anyone had told Congress this, since they hotly debated the wisdom of entering the war at all. And there was something slyly evasive about many of the narrator's historical paraphrases: "The 'good war' ", he summarised, "had ushered in a new age when such terrible things would never happen again because evil had been banished from the world." Who ever believed this? There can be no detailed attribution because no one ever did, only Curtis, who needs a giant to tilt at. "On the Dangerous Edge of Now" was a fairy-tale itself, the one about the little boy who questions the Emperor's new clothes. The only problem being that people have been talking about His Majesty's nudity for at least 50 years.

But Curtis was on much sounder ground with "You Have Used Me As a Fish Long Enough" (he has a taste for these slightly hollow enigmas). To begin with, his account of the CIA's involvement with post-war psychiatry introduces the viewer to much less familiar material. Of course, this may simply mean that we are less well-equipped to detect the distortions - but it didn't entirely feel like that. Curtis is occasionally gullible - one contributor told the story of how the CIA spent $20m putting an acoustic bug inside a cat and then watched as their prototype was run over by a truck, an anecdote that, sadly, falls apart after a moment's reflection. But there's little doubt that the Cold War induced a strange psychosis in certain quarters, or that scientists made some weird Faustian pacts with government. And Curtis's distinctive style was better suited to this surreal world of shifting meanings than the complexities of global politics - he has a real talent for suggestive cutting, a collagist's eye for images wrenched out of context and pasted into something new and unsettling. He aims constantly at cultural discordancy, combining jaunty music with sinister images, cheesy movies with a sombre narration, in a way that induces a strange emotional queasiness. At its best it sets the mind dancing, trying to keep its feet, but you can never quite set aside the possibility that the movement is all illusory.

Dangerous Lady (ITV) is one of those dramas in which the sight of an all-white bedroom sets your stomach heaving. You know that the director is thinking how well it will set off a pool of blood. Sure enough, it isn't long before the satin is aswill. "Where does it all end, Mickey?" asks Maura. It ends, Maura, when you run out of brothers (two down, five to go) and when the director finally gets bored of paying homage to The Godfather.