Governments justify their existence by claiming to benefit us, the people, but they often do the exact opposite. For example, our own governments have introduced prescription charges and costly PFI schemes; messed up our railways; allowed huge numbers of post offices to be closed; and destroyed nearly all our coalmines. The British and American governments also did us no good by supporting Saddam Hussein in his futile war against Iran, before doing a volte face and invading Iraq.

House of Saddam (BBC2) reminded us of Saddam's ruthlessness in seizing the presidency of Iraq and waging war against Iran. This drama was rightly compared by the Radio Times to movies about the Mafia, as it contained some of the same ingredients, including a wedding with unpleasant undercurrents and a powerful, brutal family. In fact, the family in-fighting tended to obscure the political events in the first episode of this four-part drama, and the Iran-Iraq War seemed to start without much explanation. Nonetheless, this was a powerful dramatisation of events at the start of Saddam's dictatorship, with reminders of the way that tyrants like Saddam are 'worshipped' by the populace in the same uncritical way that former despots (Hitler and Stalin, for example) were idolised, however cruel and dangerous they were.

Another blunder by the British government was its handling of the situation in Palestine before and after the Second World War. The Balfour Declaration accepted the principle of a Jewish state in Palestine, leading eventually to a murderous conflict between Palestine and Israel which continues today. Car Bomb (Channel 4) examined the history of one of the main weapons used in this and other conflicts. Presenter Robert Baer started by saying: "For 50 years we were all told that nuclear weapons were the real threat, but that's a lie. The real terrorist threat has always been the car bomb: crude and unstoppable." Baer described how, when he was a CIA agent in Beirut, he frequently changed the car he used and the routes he took, to avoid the bombers who eventually blew up the US embassy. The devastating use of car bombs spread from Beirut to Israel and Palestine, where militant Jews car-bombed an Arab building and the Palestinians retaliated by car-bombing a Jewish business street.

Robert Baer managed to interview several erstwhile car-bombers, who were all unconcerned about killing innocent people. Baer's most surprising statement was that "car bombs are an American invention". He described how, in 1920, an anarchist bombed Wall Street in protest at the treatment of Sacco and Vanzetti: anarchists who were imprisoned and later executed. It wasn't quite the first car bomb, as the vehicle used was a horse-drawn wagon.

Talking of cars, Gordon Brown keeps telling us how sympathetic he is towards ordinary people faced with rising costs - like that for petrol. Yet Panorama (BBC1) pointed out that the Government adds more than 50 pence to the cost of a litre of petrol through fuel tax and VAT. British petrol taxes are the highest in Europe.

You might have expected Arena: Cab Driver (BBC4) to throw some light on the plight of London taxi drivers faced with escalating fuel prices, but it was one of the least informative documentaries ever shown. It interviewed a few cabbies, but cut up the interviews into short snippets and interspersed them with old film clips including scenes from Carry On Cabby and recurrent shots of a map of central London. A potentially absorbing subject was turned into a pointless montage which told us very little, apart from occasionally revealing comments. One cabbie compared his taxi to a money box: "You're just driving around and people just putting money into it."

Dispatches: Sandwiches Unwrapped (Channel 4) at least conveyed some unpalatable facts about the ingredients in some of the many sandwiches on sale. The programme noted that the British have the longest working hours in Europe but we have very short lunch breaks - hence the growing market for bits of bread containing dubious fillings.