Television: It's all the fault of the solar system

It had been a long time coming, but the BBC finally had some good news last week when Noel Edmonds, one of the architects of dumb television, resigned in a greedy huff. But where were the champagne corks? It was hard to hear anything apart from the gnashing of teeth and the sharpening of knives. Even the newspapers tried to present the exciting collapse of Crinkley Bottom as fresh evidence that the BBC was a sinking ship.

Edmonds' fans needn't have worried. It was embarrassingly clear, watching the BBC's coverage of the eclipse, that the shadow cast by Mr Blobby continues to haunt even our most serious broadcasters. It began with a double-take. "Hello," said Michael Buerk, "and welcome to Cornwall for the moment Britain's been waiting for." He hesitated, looked puzzled, then nodded. "Hello," he said even more brightly, "and welcome to Cornwall for the moment Britain's been waiting for."

It was only a glitch, but it set the tone for what was to come. A stately astronomical wonder, which merited little more than respectful silence, was reduced to a clownish Seaside Special. In one sense they were unlucky: they found themselves with the cloudiest view in Britain. But as the rain teemed down there were interviews with dogs, owls and crickets ("they may start chirruping"); there was the "quest" for the millennium baby, and guff about druids and star signs and pagan rituals. Scientists in silly waistcoats (to prove they weren't boring!) spoke of the zone of totality and the prominences on the corona; weathermen cowered in windcheaters, admitting that clouds were "quite literally" on the horizon.

Buerk struggled to give the proceedings the flavour of an emergency. He cut urgently between coastguards and the RAF Hercules with its special gyroscopic camera ("used in horse-racing"), and there was talk of the "eclipse rapid-response unit" (a bewildering idea, given that this event had been immutably fixed in the schedules for millions of years). Amazingly, given the amount of notice they had, the event itself seemed to take them by surprise. In the final countdown ("Fifteen seconds! Twelve seconds!") they lost the picture altogether. Afterwards, cameras scoured the soggy beaches in search of grannies in tears, and dropped into the pet centre to see how the animals had reacted ("the cricket definitely chirruped!"). There was some routine mockery of ancient beliefs, "dragons eating the sun" and so on, but what on earth (or in space) will people say of us when our beliefs are ancient?

It was no consolation that the coverage on Channel 5 was even more comical. Despite being anchored by the admirably suave Kirsty Young, the show kept slipping loose from its moorings and flapping in the wind. The producers had not just dimmed down for the day: they surrendered completely to the dark side. On an occasion that cried out for someone dry enough to survive the downpour, they leant heavily on Russell Grant puffing about in a stone circle. "We were unable to rejoin the studio," he trilled at one point, because "there are lots of cosmic energies up there". When contact was regained, Young eclipsed him slightly by explaining that they'd moved indoors to get out of the rain. It served them all right when the astrologer invited to read Young's star chart predicted that the eclipse signalled a big promotion for her, perhaps even to the BBC. You could almost hear the sound of hair being torn, plugs being pulled.

Naturally, both channels kept repeating, under cover of medical advice, that the best place to watch the eclipse was on television. But this was a risky and insincere tactic, easily disproved. You had only to step outside for a minute, as the world grew milky and pale and quiet, and feel the chill of that giant moon shadow zooming across the Atlantic and on towards Bengal, to see what a fatuous claim it was. By concentrating on the silly hysteria surrounding the event, television utterly missed its one singular quality. There was no sense of a vast heavenly rotation. Instead of the music of the spheres, we had a Radio 1 roadshow. At one point (as crowds gathered in Paris, Stuttgart, Bucharest and right across the Middle East and India) Buerk even had the cheek to call it "a typically British occasion".

Television does not give up easily, however. Last week it seemed determined to keep us hunkered down in front of the telly with the curtains drawn and the door locked, watching sober documentaries about how scary it is out there. Last week's melancholy look at the human debris of last year's IRA bomb-blast (Omagh, One Year On, ITV) is followed by an even more sombre account of that anguish (Omagh: The Legacy, BBC1, tonight). Dispatches (C4) came up with an alarmist documentary about the way fundamentalist Islamic groups are recruiting trainees for violence in Britain, and sending them to learn about guns and bombs in Afghanistan. And I'll Be Watching You (ITV) described the case of Tracey Morgan, who endured seven years of awful harassment by a former friend and campaigned for the introduction of a law that would make the dumping of condoms and sanitary towels on her lawn, and the sending of threatening letters, a criminal offence.

It was an immensely sad story, and the protagonists were eloquent enough to shrug off the footling insertion of the usual inane "reconstructions": a gloved hand put a phone down, a car squealed to a halt. Tracey emerged as dignified and fearfully persecuted, abandoned by a legal system that failed to detect a crime in Anthony Burstow's calculated campaign to terrify her. The film's only drawback was its reluctance to explore the exact nature of Burstow's malice.

The Russian Cracker (BBC1), on the other hand, crossed whole-heartedly into enemy lines and secured remarkable footage of young men articulating their own sadistic motives. If any last-minute holiday-makers are thinking of picking up a cheap flight to Rostov-on-Don, they had better think twice. It's the serial-killer capital of Russia and the world: in the last eight years 30 recreational murderers have come to light in the area, the most notorious of whom claimed 56 victims. The programme's hero was Professor Bukhanovsky, a specialist in the psychological profiling of serial killers, and we accompanied him as he went out on a limb, hiding the identity of his deadly patients in an attempt to "cure" them.

There were moments when the simplistic tendencies of television refused to be appeased. "The economic crisis caused him to start stealing," we were told. "This then led to rape, which led in turn to murder." If only it were that simple. But Bukhanovsky took us patiently into the mucky fantasy life of his subjects, and then let them speak for themselves. "I was interested in how the train would explode," said one young man. "I'd tie them up and watch the acid eat into their flesh," said another. "I have suffered so much that I want to kill everyone."

It wasn't easy to see this as anything like a laughing matter, but a couple of fresh comedians, Armstrong and Miller (C4), did manage to tease a joke out of the subject. In one of their fun-sized sketches, a man was led out of a courtroom and off to prison. "Is it true," cried the assembled media, "that you're the gay serial killer?" The man looked outraged and approached the camera. "I'm not the gay serial killer," he said, as if he was talking to simpletons. "I'm the serial killer who happens to be gay."

This was cheeky, and represented a faint brightening of the skies after the week's long pageant of dark deeds. But we had to be grateful for small mercies: at least we weren't obliged to watch Noel Edmonds larking about at Stonehenge, going Blobby-Blobby-Blobby to the Moon.

Brian Viner is away