Last Night's Television: Going Postal, BBC2, Churchill's Darkest Decision, Channel 4

Television last night offered very little to alleviate a mostly grey bank holiday.

I counted two primetime programmes about mass murder, one about torture, one about Karen Carpenter dying of anorexia, another about the burgeoning world of secret surveillance, and The Omid Djalili Show. Then on Channel 4 there was live coverage from an NHS operating theatre, the first of four such programmes, billed in the Radio Times as "tonight Francis Wells performs open heart surgery at Papworth Hospital", unwittingly in the style of "tonight, Tony Bennett performs his greatest hits at Carnegie Hall". Not, of course, that I seek to diminish the heroics of Mr Wells, the surgeon at Papworth, who incidentally would doubtless be horrified to hear that Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco, and was unveiled in the evening's truest demonstration – with all due respect to 73-year-old breakdancer Fred Bowers, doing forward rolls and standing on his head on ITV1 – of the indubitable fact that Britain's got talent.

Another highly talented Brit is Paul Tickell, the film-maker whose documentary Going Postal, about the grim litany of gun massacres in the United States since the late 1980s, was exemplary in just about every way. The term "going postal" relates to the disproportionate number of disaffected postal workers who carried out these shootings, and although the phenomenon has become even more common in schools and colleges, a person rampaging with a gun is still said, in the US, to be going postal. Going mental is perhaps how we would phrase it on this side of the Atlantic, but psychological frailty has been identified as only one of many reasons why these killings occur with such depressing frequency in middle America.

A sociology professor popped up with the fascinating observation (proving that fascinating observations and sociology professors don't have to be mutually exclusive) that they very often happen within extremely stable communities, an apparent paradox except that the stability of a community can be a curse rather than a blessing to someone who feels unhappy with his status (the overwhelming majority of shooters are male), someone whose "marginality feels like a life sentence," as the prof put it. Paducah, Kentucky, is a perfect example of such a community and it was at a high school there in 1997 that 14-year-old Michael Carneal killed three classmates, including Jessica James, whose still-stricken parents sat in front of Tickell's camera explaining that their religious faith had never wavered. "We never know when the Lord's going to call us home," said one of Jessica's parents, I can't remember which, although they were clearly united on the subject of the Almighty. It is odd, and possibly significant, how America's Bible Belt is also America's ammunition belt: most of the massacres featured here occurred south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Where Going Postal scored heavily over similar documentaries was in Tickell's pared-down style. There was no solemn narration, no fatuous mood music, just interview after interview with, in cases where they survived, the perpetrators and the victims, the shooters and the shot, plus assorted relatives and academics. Unlike Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, this was no anti-gun polemic; indeed, nobody even raised the subject of gun control and Tickell admirably resisted the temptation to flash US gun-owning statistics across the screen. What he did do was cut back repeatedly to his interview with the enthusiastic proprietor of a typical mid-American weapon store, allowing us to make the connection ourselves between indiscriminate shooting sprees and the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which enshrines the right of all citizens to keep and bear arms, and which instils in an alarming number of otherwise sensible Americans the same kind of teary-eyed pride as photographs of their grandchildren.

Still, that celebrated and faintly alarming photograph of Winston Churchill with a machine-gun was the motif for Richard Bond's film Churchill's Darkest Decision, another fine and meticulously researched documentary, which showed that over here, too, teary-eyed pride can be misplaced. The decision in question was Churchill's order in June 1940 to attack the French fleet, lest it fall into German hands. The French naval chief, Admiral Darlan, had assured him that his sailors would scuttle their own ships as soon as any such threat materialised, but Churchill decided that he didn't want to take any chances, hence, the sinking of several French battleships, and the consequent deaths of 1, 297 French sailors, in the harbour at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria.

When Churchill gloomily reported the news to the House of Commons, there was great excitement, a reminder that with the modern House of Commons currently no less exercised by a floating duck house, we live in somewhat smaller times. Whatever, President Roosevelt was sufficiently impressed by Churchill's ruthlessness in attacking the French fleet to send over 50 warships, so perhaps the ends justified the terrible means. Not for one of the two old French sailors interviewed, though, who said he would never forgive the British. The other insisted that he bore no grudge. "Have you ever seen an intelligent war?" he asked. Too true.