Outside the Apple store on London's Regent Street last September, Jacques Peretti interviewed the faithful as they queued for the new iPhone 5s. What's different about the new phone that makes it so desirable, he asked the man at the front of the queue. "Probably not much," he replied genially. Yes, there was fingerprint recognition and a faster camera, but neither really explained why he'd been there for three days.

While this sequence might make us despair for humanity, we should admire the marketing: to get people to queue for something minimally different from the thing they already own for reasons that they can scarcely account for surely means that someone at Apple should be given a medal – and/or taken into the woods and shot for corrupting public morals.

What's become of us? Why have so few taken in the message of George Romero's 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, in which zombiefied humans wander cathedral-like malls vainly trying to fill the existential holes in their lives with commodities? Why do so few of us have what it takes, as Schopenhauer put it, to celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing? These questions underpinned Peretti's The Men Who Made Us Spend (BBC2, Saturday).

"The idea of continual spending is deeply embedded in our collective consciousness," he argued, before elegantly tracing how we became such unremitting consumers during the past century. First, there was the shady cartel of lightbulb manufacturers in 1920s Germany who reduced the working lives of their bulbs from 2,500 hours to 1,000. Thus that great motor of capitalist profit, built-in obsolescence, was born. Then, in 1950s America, General Motors' Alfred P Sloan segmented the market with different models for different consumer classes to better titillate demand and convinced Americans to buy a new car every year. By then consumerism was Americans' patriotic duty in the cold war against Soviet saps who were denied the lie-dream of capitalism: freedom of choice.

Next, Peretti explained how the ideology of consumerism was imported to Britain in the 1980s when Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's shoppers' charter of personal utility maximisation through freely exercised purchasing power became Margaret Thatcher's credo.

Best of all, Peretti took out the proverbial Allen key to deconstruct Ikea. He didn't quite say that Ikea had transcended Huxleyan satire by making Brave New World's "ending is better than mending" thesis key to its UK business model, but he did highlight how Ikea's "chuck out your chintz" ad campaign from 1996 was inimical to the sustainability cult that has recently attracted so many of consumerism's former faithful. There was a superbly prickly exchange between Peretti and Ikea's head of sustainability (tough gig) in which the presenter called the Swedish firm to account for its 2012 Spike Jonze-directed ad, the premise of which was that we should overcome our sentimental attachment to mere things, bin off our old table lamps and buy slightly different Ikea ones (insofar as I understand the ad's message).

What I'd also liked Peretti to have tackled is how consumerism affects human relationships. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that desire is the wish to consume. Hence, one would have thought, not just disposable sofas, toothbrushes and cars, but lovers hard-wired for obsolescence, shoved out on to the kerb in favour of different models in new colours and this year's must-have features in the endless freecycle of love.

From Scotland With Love. Photograph: PR

A Century in Film: from Scotland with Love (BBC4, Sunday) depicted a time before iPhones and Ikea, a mostly black-and-white, possibly happier age, in which men worked with metal and women got elbow deep in herring. Virginia Heath's virtuosic, wordless montage of archive footage of Scots loving, living and, heroically, sea-bathing was as affecting as Terence Davies's love letter to lost Liverpool, Of Time and the City, or the more bucolic sequences in Bill Douglas's trilogy of films about his childhood – though over an hour and a quarter her work and King Creosote's lovely accompanying songs were subject to the law of diminishing returns.

No matter: let's have more wordlessly poetic paeans to our filmed past. Why, I kept wondering, did life look grander and more communal then, the funerals vaster than ours today? And then I realised it was because, then as now, funerals without mourners don't get filmed, nor do things we do unphotogenetically alone. Heath's film, then, if beautifully, falsified the past, making me feel nostalgic for places I've never been and for times that never quite existed as depicted – which is some kind of genius.