This week has been Children's TV Week, although you may not have noticed because the BBC has made little fanfare about it and tucked the programmes away on BBC4 so that they are inaccessible to many viewers. Yet it's an important subject, as children's television is under threat. ITV has closed its children's TV department and the BBC has announced that it will cater only for the under-11s. The BBC's tradition of Saturday-morning programmes for children has been replaced by wall-to-wall cookery.

Goodbye Children Everywhere (BBC4) provided some background to the situation by tracing the history of children's television, although its research was faulty in stating that children's programmes began in 1946. In fact, there was a programme called For the Children which ran from 1937 to 1939 and resumed after the war until it was replaced by Watch with Mother.

The survey made links between early programmes and later offerings, for example describing the Flowerpot Men as "the Teletubbies of their day". It also pointed out the strong vein of surrealism that has run through kids' programming - from the antics of the Clangers to the weirdness of The Magic Roundabout and beyond. The programme also showed how children's TV changed with the advent of ITV's more populist approach - and then the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which opened the floodgates for commercial stations whose kids' programming was mainly an excuse for commercials trying to sell toys and games.

A nightly series entitled Children's TV on Trial (BBC4) again outlined the history of kids' television and showed how changing times forced TV stations to update their offerings for children. This has concentrated their focus, so that a strand like CBeebies caters mainly for pre-school children - and does the job very well, providing a mixture of education and entertainment which parents can rest assured is suitable for their offspring. The main criticism of CBeebies and CBBC might be that both channels rely heavily on repeats - but perhaps this responds to youngsters' familiar cry of "Again, again!"

One of this week's original programmes was Lusitania: Murder on the Atlantic (BBC1), although a film with exactly the same title was made in the US in 1998. It dramatised the sinking by a German submarine in May 1915 of the Lusitania, a liner carrying about 2,000 passengers from New York to Liverpool. It was narrated by John Hannah, who also appeared as a Scottish passenger on the ship. The reconstruction was convincing, with good performances from Hannah as Prof Holbourn, Kenneth Cranham as the ship's captain, and Madeleine Garrood as Avis, the young girl befriended by Holborn.

It started by stating that the sinking led to "a new age when governments justify the killing of innocent men, women and children in the name of war". Yet it also pointed out that the British were already trying to starve Germany into submission by blockading its ports. Rather more persuasively, the programme suggested that Winston Churchill and the Admiralty were happy for the Lusitania to be sunk, as it might bring America into the war. Certainly the captain was treated as a scapegoat to let the Admiralty off the hook.

This production was marred by the usual camera instability - shaking about unnecessarily when the vessel was sinking and thus obscuring the images. And there was a plethora of anachronisms, including the use of such words as egghead (which almost certainly came to Britain much later) and hold when someone said "May I ask you to hold for a moment?" in the middle of a phone-call. Would a band playing on the New York quayside really have mixed black and white musicians? And how could a lady sing the song I Love a Piano in May 1915, when Irving Berlin's composition was only premiered in a Broadway show in December 1915? The song was performed by someone called Dorothy Taylor but no such person has appeared on any of the Lusitania's passenger lists that I have seen.