Geldof on Fathers; Geldof on Marriage Channel 4

Sex Traffic Channel 4

Trial and Retribution ITV1

Channel 4's Geldof on Fathers opened with an authorial voice-over set against footage of men playing tenderly with small children. It was a self-consciously writerly sort of a rant, spoken softly but simmering with barely suppressed fury:

'Battersea Park, Sunday,' said Bob, quietly, 'every second measured and weighed in the balance of loss, losing. Going away and fading. Everything must be crammed into this space. Life in an hour. Love in a measured fragment of state-permitted time. Feed the ducks again. McDad in McDonald's. Where else do you go?'

But he couldn't suppress the rage for long and, over the course of the next hour, spewed a thesaurus's-worth. Here's some of it:

'Criminalised. Belittled ... Worthless. Powerless. Irrelevant ... Biased. Prejudiced. Discriminatory. Hypocritical. Inflammatory ... Discord. Bitterness ... Rage ... Anger. Hatred. Reactionary. Unfair. Illogical. Destructive. Failed. Decrepit ... Prejudiced. Belittled. Impoverished. Embittered. Corrosive. Disgraceful ... Impertinent. Insane. Outdated ... Defunct. Fractured. Scarred, Disgusting, Disgraceful. ... Distraught. Ruinous ... Vulgar. Perverse, Vile, Frightening. Emasculated. Eviscerated ... Plagued. Manipulated ... Farcical. Outdated. Inadequate'. And, several times, 'Unjust. Unjust. Unjust. Unjust .'

We watched Geldof reading from notes to camera, Geldof interviewing solicitors and law lords, ministers and professors and, of course, empathising with fathers who had lost custody of their children as a result of what he hyperbolically described as 'state-sponsored child abuse'. Some of this, admittedly, was very moving, particularly if you took the stories at face value.

'Do you have anxiety before he comes, or is it just longing? Or is it a mixture?' Geldof asked Jim Parton of the pressure group Families Need Fathers, in relation to Parton's occasional visits from a son who now lives with his mother in Japan. Parton, previously articulate and stiff-of-lip, stalled and stammered before breaking down in tears, at which point Geldof leaned over and held his hand.

But I wasn't moved for long because we weren't told the circumstances of the break-up of Parton's marriage, or details of his cus tody battle - if indeed there had been one (Parton seemed to imply that, daunted by the legal process, he'd just given up and let events take their course - which would, of course, have been unlikely to result in his winning custody).

As Geldof pitched his argument more along the lines of a battle of the sexes than as any sort of justifiable fight against the clearly inadequate unsubtleties of the law, it was, I suspect, virtually impossible for any woman to watch this and not emerge feeling almost as enraged by the issues raised as Geldof, albeit for entirely different reasons.

'If the child is already living with the mum ... the courts may well decide that it is in the child's best interest to continue,' said Margaret Hodge, gently but firmly.

'But that's wrong !' shouted Geldof.

But a lot of the time it probably isn't wrong. One of the few facts buried in the film was that more women apply for residency orders and more men for contact orders, ergo the majority of divorcing men do not actually want sole or even equal custody of their children but are happy enough to negotiate visitation rights, for whatever reasons.

I am all for making the personal political but there was a painful self-righteousness and divisiveness at the heart of this film, which was haunted by the silent blond spectre at the centre of Geldof's own marital breakdown. And by the time we'd negotiated the amateurish camerawork and arrived at the rants about lonely and impoverished fathers barely existing in bedsits, the injustice of men being perceived as 'not trustworthy as humans - we're hairy and brutish with uncontrollable man-urges', I had given up the possibility of hearing anything that wasn't informed by Geldof's undeniably painful but almost entirely unique emotional journey.

In the end Geldof suggested a 50-50 parental custody split, wherever possible, as a legal starting point to neutralise any subsequent negotiating position. Theoretically fair enough, yet a 50-50 split - or even 60-40 or 70-30 - is almost entirely impractical in real life. Only ex-couples with considerable funds are going to be able to create two family-sized homes close enough to each other to make for minimum disruption, and, if both parties work, to pay for two sets of complementary childcare.

And, of course, this kind of split-arrangement is potentially disastrous for children, who loathe being shunted around from parent to parent at set times simply because those parents believe it is the 'right' thing to do. That this perceived 'rightness' should be enshrined in law would, as Margaret Hodge correctly pointed out, inevitably 'produce more conflict, more litigation'.

Geldof on Fathers was a companion piece to the previous night's Geldof on Marriage. Here the central argument was that we treat marriage too lightly, that the 'moral value of promise has disintegrated' in a consumer culture of instant gratification in which we're busy indulging an overblown sense of self ('Because I'm worth it'). That, in short, we have confused freedom with the idea of choice.

I don't actually disagree with this, but I did disagree very strongly with Geldof's contention that divorce has been made too easy. Far from it: divorce is plenty hard enough - it is marriage that has been made too easy.

In Geldof's case it was clearly easy for him to indulge himself in making films that, ultimately, revealed nothing more than the scale of his self-righteous rage. But I don't doubt that anger can be channelled very cathartically if one happens to be the co-founder and non-executive director of a company that produces documentaries.

On the subject of imbalance, however, perhaps I ought not to have given over quite so much space to Geldof when last week also saw the start of Sex Traffic, which, rather ironically, is almost everything one would look for in a contemporary drama - informed and informative, thrillingly entertaining and tackling a hugely difficult subject without ever resorting to shock tactics or exploitation - the opposite of Geldof's uneasy, self-dramatising efforts.

Sex Traffic , written by the gifted Abi Morgan, is ostensibly the story of two Moldovan sisters who, believing they are headed to a better life in the west, are sold into prostitution by untrustworthy, brutish men with deeply nasty, uncontrollable man-urges.

It is a powerful, compulsive, unputdownable television journey (I watched both parts in one sitting, occasionally emerging for a gulp of fresh air) and by the end I felt richer for it. Many feature films aspire to create a similarly riveting strength of narrative, but I can't remember when I last saw a cinema release as powerful and intelligently realised as this British and Canadian co- production. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if it was remade in Hollywood.

There is sex in Sex Traffic , but it's not the kind you want to watch. There is nudity but no titillation, which is an enormously difficult balance to achieve (the direction is stunningly good and the actors respond in kind). There is a multi-layered plot, too, involving the corrupting influence of a US government-sanctioned private security firm acting under the auspices of the International Peacekeeping Coalition, not to mention love and war and betrayal, shopping and fucking and shocking fucking, glamour and grime, and - praise be - the never less than fabulous John Simm.

Indeed one of the few implausible aspects of the story centres on the fact that Simm, as a charity worker investigating the human traffic from eastern Europe, doesn't enlist a campaigning journalist to help his cause, but this is probably because the best person for that job is Cal MacCaffrey, aka John Simm, star reporter on State of Play 's mighty organ, the Daily Nighy . Whatever: I cannot recommend Sex Traffic highly enough - if you missed part one, set the video for C4, 11.10 tonight. It concludes on Thursday.

I watched Trial and Retribution by Lynda La Plante after I'd seen Sex Traffic , so inevitably it suffers by comparison. From the opening shots of the body of a beautiful woman - a prostitute - falling in slo-mo from the balcony of an apartment and landing on the bonnet of a car (shot-for-shot an identical death to that suffered by Claire Goose in Waking The Dead ) we were treated, if that's the right word, to a glossy, populist prime-time vision of prostitution and sexual perversion, the sort that revels in close-ups of the bodies of brutalised women.

Dead they may be but, hey, in the world of Trial and Retribution the women invariably enjoyed their job when they were alive - may, in fact, have died because they enjoyed it so very much. Sleazy, tasteless, crude and failing to tell a cohesive or even plausible story over its three hours, the fact that this morally bankrupt piece of television was skilfully directed and executed professionally enough to make it intensely watchable means there will presumably be a great deal more of the same. Profoundly depressing.