The documentary took two themes, the main one being that ITV was and still is the people’s channel. Presenter Melvyn Bragg attempted to identify a strand which unites 1950s and ’60s programmes like Sunday Night at the London Palladium with contemporary reality TV shows such as I’m a Celebrity … The message was that, fundamentally, ITV hasn’t changed; it is still doing what it has always done, what it does best, albeit in a different way for different times.

A second shtick was that ITV is unique amongst commercial broadcasters because as well as being a tough, commercial channel, its public service remit has produced excellence and demanded respect in fields such as current affairs and the arts, and a commitment to regional programming.

The bland, unimaginative studio backdrop unintentionally provided an appropriately sterile antidote to Bragg’s sometimes triumphalist commentary. It was as if he were expecting some phantom studio audience leftover from Palladium days to applaud his litany of ITV’s half-century of achievements. But it all felt a bit hollow because the programme attempted to disguise the network’s commercial and artistic decline in recent years by taking a largely thematic rather than chronological approach. Whilst ITV1 remains the most watched channel in terrestrial only homes, its audiences and share have dropped dramatically and its nervousness is evident in its recent panic commissioning of tired celebrity formats which have failed to draw audiences (the much vaunted and quickly withdrawn Celebrity Wrestling crushed by a revitalised Doctor Who is a case in point). Executive Charles Allan talked about ITV today being better positioned than ever, an extraordinary statement that went totally unchallenged.

As to ITV’s tattered public service commitment, this was first smashed by the 1990 Broadcasting Act and subsequently watered down to the extent that it is now honoured by a few trophy programmes (the main one perhaps being, ironically, Bragg’s very own South Bank Show). ITV’s hard-hitting current affairs were trumpeted by referencing World in Action and proudly declaring ITV still packs a punch today (yes, but only in the occasional sidelined Pilger doc, not the ongoing, peak time strands like Tonight with Trevor Macdonald, let alone the “fabric” of the channel).

Even so, in focusing on Sunday Night at the London Palladium and Coronation Street, the programme did give a feel of how the two elements which largely characterised peak time early ITV – showbiz glitz and Granadaland grit – must have felt so entirely innovative and exciting to an audience accustomed to BBC deference and dullness (the creaking clip of the Duke of Norfolk at Arundel Castle illustrated this to a tee). Early ITV also unashamedly introduced eager audiences to US westerns, crime series and sitcoms, as well as ushering in a transatlantic brashness to many of its own quiz shows, not to mention the big budget glamour of the Lew Grade stable of ITC adventures; these must have seemed like emblems of egalitarianism and optimism as Britain emerged from post war austerity into the bright, new age of proto consumerism and you could almost see this in the enthralled faces of studio audiences of shows like Take Your Pick. There was a poignancy here because the rows of be-hatted women and raincoated men could easily have been the audience of a holiday camp entertainment or of one of the then dying variety theatres, the very communal institutions which, with its more privatised and aspirational world view, television was set to erode.

By the time ITV’s 50th birthday falls on 22 September, it will be interesting to compare the extent of ITV’s anniversary celebrations with previous TV anniversaries. The BBC marked 30 of BBC2, whilst C4 all but ignored its 20th anniversary in 2002 – perhaps a comment on the health and robustness of each channel at the time.

We don’t yet know whether The Story of ITV is a prelude to more celebrations or the sole acknowledgement of its landmark birthday. It’s certainly significant as a rare recognition of ITV’s past given that the channel has sought to virtually extinguish all trace of this, at least on ITV1. In 1989 ITV celebrated 21 years of Thames and LWT in some style, clearing the schedules to proudly rerun its past successes and recruiting Gloria Hunniford to reminisce with many of LWT’s stars. The BBC has provided well-researched and evocative retrospectives of both Granada and ATV in two of its theme nights, far more impressive – and above all, affectionate – than tonight’s effort.

ITV does have a celebrated past and the programme allowed us a glimpse of this. But it seems as if the true story of ITV – a sad rise and decline – will go untold, at least by this series. But maybe the lingering emptiness I felt just before midnight was a kind of unease that the custodian of those more innocent times is a faceless corporate world player (yes, a people’s television with no personality). The same kind of unease at seeing Carlton on Sapphire and Steel DVD cases. The Story of ITV gave out gales of PR bluster but little in the way of real affection for the “product” it showcased.

It was the style of the programme as much as its content, which made it so entertaining. Roy Mallard is a fictional documentary-maker played by Chris Langham. Mallard provides the voice-over and interviews his subjects but never appears on-screen. The pseudo-documentaries explore aspects of contemporary British life – profiles of a mother, actor, journalist and a financial-services worker are to follow later this series. The portraits could be seen as exposés of sorts, but only by default; last Sunday’s opener employed a sometimes deceptively gentle style which cunningly served to make the resulting portrayal of loss, disappointment and delusion all the more effective. It’s as if the documentary used a kind of post-modernist whimsy in the service of social satire, but subversively, the former sharpened the latter rather than blunted it.

Much of the effectiveness of “The Vicar” was due to the uniformly excellent acting and the script’s brilliantly imaginative manipulation of language and its conventions – its unexpected twists and turns (whilst at university, Sarah was at that time “also working towards a degree of happiness”), the deadpan truisms turned into surreal banalities (“by 9.30, it’s nearly 10 o’clock”), the familiar unfamiliar (“a man in touch with his feet, both of which are on the ground”). At times it recalled Chris Morris or Alan Partridge, at other times even the highly stylised language of Martin Amis’s Money (“the world of financial money”). Perhaps such verbal inventiveness came across even more strongly on the radio series, which I’m ashamed to say I haven’t heard, but the visual elements – awkward bodily shifts and sideways glances, the wife’s accustomed empty stare perfected over 20 long years, her husband’s constant air of apology – served as a real enhancement to the spoken word.

What struck me most about the commentary was its serious tone cleverly undermined by a script which could also seem serious until even the last word in a sentence which might then be so unexpected as to make a nonsense of the whole. I found myself really having to listen carefully to what was said before realising that behind the apparent profundities of the words was something which was just absurd or meaningless (“his is one of the few professions where you’re regarded as relatively young at the age of 48, so at the age of 43 he’s regarded as young even for him”). Sometimes a choice line would be delivered almost like an afterthought as a scene was fading out, making it all the funnier for its air of overheard throwaway casualness.

No one scene outstayed its welcome. The sequence with a would-be husband rehearsing his marriage vows perhaps came closest, but when Roy Mallard became embroiled in the confusion the result was not merely farcical but also served to comically highlight the tensions around his role as observer-participant.

Just the right restrained tone was preserved throughout. I had wondered if the vicar’s wife might throw a fit at the ’70s disco, perhaps hurling a plate of fish paste sandwiches at her insipid husband, but thankfully subtlety prevailed over any such obvious hysteria. I liked the use of olives as a symbol of the sensuality she so much craved in her marriage – Mediterranean and ever so slightly aspirational; it made a change from the ubiquitous gypsy creams, that almost iconic comfort to the oppressed in your archetypal Victoria Wood sketch. The vicar’s wife’s air of quiet desperation and entrapment behind years of habitual politeness was perhaps less surprising than the apparent boundlessness of her husband’s niceness. It was as if this essential niceness was all that could be left to a middle-aged vicar in a secular age. The moment of greatest insight was reserved until almost at the close of the programme – the vicar’s comment about his calling to the priesthood being just a phase he was going through at the age of 24 that he might just as well have done nothing about. This was alarming both for its frankness and the blitheness of its delivery.

Overall, this opener proved that subtlety can be the satirist’s strongest weapon.

Drug addiction, sexual dysfunction, spiraling violence, the corruption of childhood innocence , suicide, adultery… the very stuff of Millennial angst and the staple diet of sensationalist tabloids, but are these phenomena unique to our own times? This was one of the questions which anyone viewing James Marsh’s extraordinary film for Arena must have asked themselves.

The film strongly suggested that the James Bulgar case, playground drug-peddlers and rising teenage alcoholism are but contemporary versions of our timeless cravings for excitement and the desire to ward off loneliness. In 1890s Wisconsin, dysfunctionalism sometimes took different forms – arson, murder, hysteria, mental illness, suicide – many of them made possible by the easy availability of guns, and perhaps fuelled by something of the isolation and inward lookingness of a 19th century small American town.

“Wisconsin Death Trip” took as its basis the events which befell the townsfolk of Black River Falls between 1890 and 1900 as described in the town’s local newspaper. These events, narrated in dignified, measured tones by Ian Holm (slight echoes of Alistair Cooke here?), were accompanied by mostly monochrome visuals – in turns, stark and limpid – incorporating stills, tableau, and set-piece reconstructions. The film’s style veered between the lyrical and portentous, though always laced with an undercurrent of darkness. There was no dialogue – only occasional sounds such as gunfire and shattered glass, (a recurring motif thanks to the compulsive window-breaking activities of a local schoolteacher) and the repeated whispered fate of yet another inmate bound for the lunatic asylum. The camera dwelt on faces – young and old, unformed and worn, pensive and withdrawn – and on set-piece tableau mildly reminiscent of Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives, but here a slow-pan across a shelf of pots and cooking vessels evoked not homely nostalgia but a sense of emptiness and unease. As the catalogue of misery unfolded, we were invited to empathise with these people, separated from us across time and space, surviving only as photographs and as the subjects of newspaper reports, but, in spite of the extremity of their behaviour, linked to us in terms of human desire and failings. That we were able to do so, was perhaps due to the fact that an emotional response was not demanded of us, as it is in so much of news crime reporting. Here, the poetic simplicity of images married to factual reportage, was allowed to work its strange spell and we were left to wonder about what had driven these people to such desperate measures.

The film delivered its narrative across the 1890-1900 period in what would have been a seamless flow but for its division into spring, summer, fall and winter. This construct allowed the seasons and countryside to be seen not as a mere backdrop to events, but as an elemental force shaping the lives and characters of the people. Poignantly placed visuals carefully established the passage of time and seasonal change – drops falling into a bowl of water, a flower dancing in the breeze marking the brief respite of summer. Another effective device was the use of silent-film style captions announcing forthcoming “events”. This gave the impression that the unlucky participants were acting out some kind of melodramatic, turn-of-the-century silent-film drama, yet somehow this witty device succeeded in encouraging our sympathy, where a more heavy-handed approach could easily have tipped the balance into queasy humour.

The film started and ended with the same glowing litany to Black Rock Fells, extolling the virtues of its people and open spaces. Heard for a second time, it sounded more like a hollow mantra repeated to ward off the darkness we had witnessed over the last hour and a quarter. Most disturbing of all, perhaps, were the occasional (colour) images of contemporary America intercut into the otherwise black-and-white archive – drum majorettes, the singing of the national anthem, children playing – what relation did these “outer” images have with the incidents of the 1890s? And what lay behind these display of conventions which now so singularly failed to reassure us?

Some might have found the film overtly ponderous and relentlessly bleak – accusations which could be justly leveled against it. But it’s originality of perspective, clarity of form and visual beauty for me, worked to present a moving portrait of human desperation, which never collapsed into the mawkish or morbid and asked unsettling questions of us all.

Today, tabloids, docusoaps and exposés of various kinds all noisily stake their claim to “reality”. “Wisconsin Death Trip” made no such claims but left me feeling it had touched upon some uncomfortable hidden truths – about the United States, about how we view the past; how we live today; and, most of all, about the destructive potential of our human frailties.