Murder in Mind BBC1
Manchild BBC2
The Century of the Self BBC2
Tonight ITV1

Some actors have names that fit them so perfectly that they can never really answer to another. Such is the case with Nigel Havers. It doesn't matter what name he's given in the script, Nigel Havers is Nigel Havers.

Last week he turned up twice in the company of different appellations, but on both occasions he remained singularly Nigel. Indeed, I can't recall what he was supposedly called in either, although I'm pretty sure it wasn't, say, Wayne or Keith.

In last night's Murder in Mind, Nigel played a brilliant barrister on the point of being made a judge. His plans were temporarily upset by a blackmailing prostitute (Patsy Kensit). But he soon sorted out that problem by bashing her brains out with an ashtray, and framing a criminal client with some planted cigarettes. Aficionados of these murder mystery dramas will know that there can be no smokes without fire... And sure enough Nigel was gunned down the very moment he made it to the bench.

The TV whodunit by convention starts out promisingly then beats a well-worn path to a predictable end via a couple of clearly signposted plot twists. Here, the filmmakers tried to reverse the process by telling the story backwards in a sequence of flashbacks, so that it opened with Nigel's slaying and then retraced the events that led to it, with each succeeding sequence moving further back into the recent past.

Although clever, the structure none the less failed, mostly because the fundamental problem was just the same: an intriguing start (even if it was the end) led all too inexorably to an obvious conclusion (no matter that, chronologically speaking, it was the beginning).

Much more compelling than the play's mystery was the abiding puzzle of its star's longstanding appeal: what is it? Halfway through the story, as if in answer to this very question, there was a knowing exchange between Havers and Kensit.

'I bet your hourly rate is more than mine,' she says. 'Yes,' he replies, 'but I have years of training and I have some very special skills.'

That may be so, but he's been doing the same turn for two decades or more. One can only marvel at its durability. While the act has not noticeably aged, nor has it appreciably matured. He's always confident, yet rarely convincing. His emotions, as registered on his boyishly preserved features, are unavoidably that of a man named Nigel. When called upon to work up a murderous rage, for example, following Kensit's extortion attempt, Havers could only look as if he'd been unable to book a table at The Caprice.

Of course, given the right part, Havers would make a first-class sociopath: smooth, vain and as creepy as a soft handshake. But both his directors and the actor himself tend to look for the charm in a role.

Which is one of the reasons that Manchild is another missed opportunity. Rumoured to be a comedy, it's a rather half-hearted and mawkish take on the follies of middle-aged men. This week Nigel prepared for his daughter's wedding, while his friend (Don Warrington) sulked in grief for his dead mother. Neither funny nor sad, the principal tone was unerringly smug.

Light comedy is sometimes said to be the most difficult and undervalued form of acting. Take away the comedy, however, and it looks a doddle. All Havers is asked to do is wear an unstructured suit and appear pleased with himself.

A Freudian might argue that Manchild fails to uncover the humour in midlife-crisis because it's all Ego and no Id. The dark machinations of the self are never glimpsed. In Adam Curtis's new documentary series the self is laid bare as never before. And it's enough to make you pause for thought. Like Dr Johnson's dull friend, television often seems to have only one idea, and that one is usually wrong. So it's not easy to prepare yourself for a programme like The Century of the Self, which is packed full of ideas, even if not all of them are right.

Bringing together politics, big business, psychiatry and public relations, this four-part series sets out to tell the Freudian history of the twentieth century. Which is to say, it not only seeks to reveal the unconscious forces that shaped major events and developments, but it also attempts to explain how the Freud family themselves helped channel these forces. That's a tall order, not least for the viewer, but Curtis, the writer and director, has shown in the past that he is adept at telling a complex story through the lives of a few individuals. His Mayfair Set, which examined casino capitalists such as Jimmy Goldsmith, is probably the best history of free-market asset-stripping ever made.

The first instalment of the new series looked at how Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, took his uncle's theory of hidden desires and applied it to consumer capitalism. He realised that if you wanted to make people behave irrationally (ie to buy goods they didn't know that they wanted) it was more effective to link products to their sublimated emotions.

Bernays invented the term 'public relations', and appears to have been the ultimate behind-the-scenes string-puller. He turned presidents into products and products into feelings. It was he who broke the taboo on women smoking by disseminating the notion that cigarettes were 'torches of freedom'.

Curtis intercut interviews with disciples of Bernays, footage of the man himself as a spry centenarian, and newsreel of vast mid-century crowds to fascinating, if slightly confusing effect. In pushing the idea that Bernays was an architect of mass control - someone whom Goebbels admired - the film did not properly address the tension between the self as an individually experienced concept and the self as a tool of mass manipulation. As a result it seemed to suggest that the difference between consumer and totalitarian societies was at best superficial, and quite possibly illusory. That said, the first part of The Century of the Self was never less than thought-provoking and if the remaining three match that we are in for a rare treat.

The late-twentieth century icon of the self was Princess Diana, who could emote for Britain, and often did. She appointed herself Queen of Hearts during the historic interview she gave to Martin Bashir. Overnight Bashir became the most envied, and so most loathed, journalist in TV. Suddenly more famous than potential interviewees, he turned himself into a big-story specialist, dealing exclusively in exclusives. Nowadays Bashir-watchers are forced to maintain a constant, mostly unrewarded vigil. His appearances, like that of some exotic bird, are few and far between and often unpredictable. But on Monday night, at last, he landed back on our screens in an unscheduled 'special' Tonight programme. With him was Joanne Lees, the woman who last year was abducted in the outback of Australia by a stranger who apparently killed her boyfriend. The reason she had allowed herself to be Bashired was because whispers persist about the validity of her escape story.

In a sense, this was another trial by television, though much less aggressive than the one Bashir conducted with the Stephen Lawrence suspects. As such it was a disappointing affair. It became clear that Lees's account was almost certainly true but that her emoting was transparently false. In short, she didn't know how to cry for the camera. One felt sorry for the poor woman. She thought that having given her statement to the police her trauma was a private matter. She hadn't realised that her, and every other, self had long been subsumed by public relations.

Kathryn Flett returns next week