Bob Dylan said: “People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties.” This is certainly true of Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: The Sixties Revealed (Five), which looked back nostalgically at the 1960s, using scraps of films that the late Bernard Braden made 40 years ago. Braden interviewed sixties’ celebrities with the intention of filming them again every three years. The film footage was never used but Channel Five has now made a three-part series by showing snippets from the interviews to some of the interviewees and watching their reactions.

Cilla Black recalled: “I loved being famous: I absolutely adored it.” Davy Jones of the Monkees said: “I used to be a heart-throb: now I'm a coronary.” And Simon Dee noted: “I wasn't trained to do anything – public school doesn’t do that.” Bernard Braden filmed 337 interviews but Five used only short extracts from them, padding the programme out with commonplace stuff about “the swinging sixties”. It would have been far more interesting to see some of Braden’s films in full.

During his interview, Davy Jones said: “The Beatles were responsible for people letting their hair down and just being a little less staid.” Are we now becoming rather more staid, with ‘health & safety’turning Britain into a ‘nanny state’? Columnists like the dreadful Richard Littlejohn (memorably christened “the stupid person’s Jeremy Clarkson”) would have us think so. The Fun Police (Channel 4) seemed at times to be on Littlejohn’s side, as it watched Ed Friend, a health & safety consultant who seemed obsessed with dangers all around us (like putting a carving knife into a bowl of soapy water, or lifting a load that is too heavy to lift). The programme referred to some of those apparently ludicrous decisions enforced for ‘health & safety’, such as the headmaster who banned playing conkers and the Donkey Derby which used toy animals on the donkeys in case children got hurt riding them.

Yet the safety-conscious people in the programme had a point. It is not only “fear of getting sued”but awareness of the real dangers in factories and homes. Ed Friend told how his father, a foundry worker, suffered burns and breathing problems from his work. He said that workers in the old days “were exploited through their ignorance”.

It’s dangerous to pour petrol over yourself, but the hero of Wallinger (BBC1) takes too long to realise this when he sees a girl doing it, and runs to her aid much too late. This was the first of three dramas based on books by Henning Mankell about Kurt Wallinger, a Swedish police detective played by Kenneth Branagh. Wallinger is one of those many fictional detectives whose investigations are almost dwarfed by their personal problems.

A psychological profiler summed up Wallinger’s situation thus: “You recently split with your wife; you have a difficult relationship with your daughter; and now your father has Alzheimer’s.” Oh, and Wallinger also has a female assistant who obviously worships him.

The gloomy story developed very slowly and the plot was too intricate for me to follow easily, although the acting was good – especially from Branagh and from David Warner as his eccentric father. But the set-up of a troubled detective trying to catch a serial killer was so familiar as to seem trite.

Law and Disorder in Philadelphia (BBC2) looked at the violence on the streets of north Philadelphia, where the main problems are drugs and guns. Louis Theroux understandably looked very nervous as one policeman warned him: “These young kids – they’ll shoot you for anything, for looking at them wrong.” Theroux’s familiar naive approach didn’t elicit much from the thugs, who are clearly expert liars, but he saw how the police tolerate drug bosses because the bosses keep their underlings in some sort of order. Philadelphia’s name means ‘brotherly love’ but one inhabitant said:“This is not a friendly city. Last year it was known as Killadelphia.”