The BBC has recently come up with a new cop show called Cuffs for Wednesday nights, a very good thing for those of us who are addicted to police procedurals and are still in mourning for The Bill, and who, up to now, have only really had the delights of the Saturday evening 9pm slot on BBC4 with its Scandinavian fare to keep us going. Cuffs is good. It is fast-moving, it brings genuine pathos to many of the troubled scenes that contemporary police officers encounter, and the characters are interesting. Policemen and women today are not far removed from social workers or indeed clergy: they need human sympathy to survive in the job. Particularly fine is the actress Amanda Abbington, whom many viewers will remember from Sherlock. Her life is a mess, but she is slowly learning that compassion for the suffering is essential to any life. While Ms Abbington is a delight, the character played by Paul Ready is quite extraordinary. Misnamed Felix, this man is a walking misery, and yet a credible one too, a reminder to us all that so many of our fellow citizens in Britain are not in the least bit happy, but are weighed down by intolerable interior burdens. I am not sure quite what the matter is with Felix, but somehow he sums up what is existentially wrong with all of us: our failure to be happy despite living in one of the most advanced and comfortable societies that the world has ever known. Middlebrow viewing, like middlebrow reading, along with cheap music, has the ability to put its finger on the pulse of the culture. Cuffs is set in Brighton, a place with which I am familiar and of which I am fond, a place by no means typical of Middle England, yet one that provides lots of credible storylines for a scriptwriter. It would be pushing it to see Brighton as Britain in miniature, but one thing is for sure: Brighton is a prosperous town, a desirable place to live, and yet home to so many social problems. Why? Meanwhile, on Saturday nights, on BBC4, Saga is back. If you have been watching The Bridge, the Swedish-Danish production, for the last two series, you will know just how deeply thrilling this is.  Saga is a brilliant detective but a difficult person, to put it mildly. She is, as a result, mesmerising, the best thing that’s ever been on television, with the possible exception of Carrie from Homeland. Of course, all three of these characters – Felix, Carrie, Saga – have a common factor to them: they are agents of truth and justice, but psychologically flawed. This is clearly a winning formula with the viewers – but why? The answer lies in the figure whom TS Eliot called “the wounded surgeon” in his poem Little Gidding. The wounded surgeon is of course Christ the Lord, and Eliot’s phrase recalls the words of the first letter of St Peter: “By his wounds you have been healed.” (I Peter 2:25.) I am not saying that Saga and the rest are Christ figures, but rather they represent a distant cultural echo not just of the wound from which we all suffer, that of sin, but also of the one who can heals us, the Son of God, who became wounded for our sakes.