If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was the subtle message of Eldorado, a documentary that pretended to inform us about the real-life background sexual milieu to Cabaret and Babylon Berlin, but was really much more interested in promoting its political view that Weimar Germany with its sexual promiscuity, rampant drug use and anything-goes view on ‘gender’ represented some kind of paradise on Earth which we should seek to emulate.

A voice-over told us what to think: ‘They feel intimidated by this rapid change. The pace of change is a source of frustration to just about everybody. If you’re a radical, then change is happening much too slowly for you. On the other side, if you’re a conservative you’re watching everything that gives your life depth and meaning washed away. And it’s that experience of being threatened by this change that gives fascists fertile ground in which to spread their poisonous ideas…’

Now wait just a second. Even in the liberated 21st century an awful lot of us feel uncomfortable at the aggressive promotion of transexualism by institutions like the Tavistock clinic. Surely this doesn’t make us unwitting dupes of dangerous and unhealthy far-right ideology? Couldn’t it simply be the case that we’re ordinary, reasonable folk who see nothing ‘progressive’ about unbridled progressivism, regardless of whether or not extremists feel the same way?

I found this conflation of small ‘c’ conservatism and fascism not only morally dubious but historically dishonest. It ignored the fact, for example, that in interwar Germany the Nazis were often seen not as the enemy of sexual decadence but its embodiment. Also, it pretended that all those no doubt marvellously exciting clubs that Christopher and His Kind frequented – and later celebrated in Cabaret – were chock-full of transsexuals, which they just weren’t. Yes, there may have been much unbridled homosexuality and cross-dressing. But as the documentary was forced to concede, sex-change surgery was so dangerous at the time that the total number of transsexuals – as opposed to transvestites – in Berlin was just three.

By way of escape from Netflix’s dogmatic messaging, I sought refuge in BBC3’s ludicrous but addictive reality series The Traitors. A group of Australians from diverse backgrounds – a sparky (that’s Aussie for electrician), a lawyery, a modelly, a supermarket checky, etc – are confined in an agreeable country hotel where, one by one, they are ‘murdered’.

The people doing the ‘murdering’ are members of their group who have been secretly designated ‘Traitors’. While the rest scrabble around on various feeble sub-I’m-A-Celebrity challenges to scrape together a not-that-generous prize pot, the Traitors conspire to undermine them, to sow dissent among them, and bump them off.

Yes, it’s all very silly and an unutterable waste of life that might be better spent, say, reading Anna Karenina. But you do – assuming the edit is honest, which, being reality TV, it almost certainly isn’t – learn quite a bit about human psychology, and also about the war being waged by the popular entertainment industry against civilised values.

Note, for example, how the entire premise of the game is to celebrate lies, conspiracy, deception and division. And how you, the viewer, no matter how high-minded you think you are, cannot help but rejoice in all this duplicity while despising those innocent Faithfuls (as the non-Traitors are known) for their risible malleability and gullibility.

Every evening, the contestants gather for a group meeting in which they confer as to which suspected Traitor should be banished from the game. And almost every time, the Faithfuls end up banishing one of their own, on the basis of convictions which they passionately believe derive from careful sifting of the evidence but which in reality turn out to derive from petty prejudices (spoiler alert: the guy with the intense, starey eyes and the pushy black woman stood no chance, even though both were innocent), misunderstood remarks, false rumours, wounded vanity and groundless hunches.

It’s like watching the perfect antidote to 12 Angry Men. If these contestants are remotely representative of the world at large, heaven help the jury system!