Marshall McLuhan may not be much read now, and that may be because he is unreadable, but he was surely right when he wrote that the medium was the message. The medium of BBC One's Britain from Above is the aerial shot, augmented by computer graphics and the sinister phenomenon of the GPS tracking device. But its only message is “Look, what a busy, clever island we are, we are.” Last night's opener had height, but lacked depth.

Even that great explicator, the presenter Andrew Marr, flailed around, trapped in the programme's medium/message conundrum. Up Hampstead Heath he puffed, “a lone political journalist trying to run off last night's bottle of red”. In helicopters and private planes he chatted with men in suits. But from these lofty heights, he delivered platitudes and not always well-turned ones.

“Think of it as a national machine with its fingers in every part of the country,” he said of our infrastructure. Ah, that sort of machine - the type with fingers! Nor was his commentary free of condescension. On a cab ride through London's inadequate roads, he exclaimed: “And, my friends, it is not easy and it rarely makes us happy.” Having arrived in the City, he explained its 2,000-year-old labyrinths and sudden spaces as being conduits for “the oil of all human society”, gossip (and here was I thinking Marr disapproved of the stuff).

The dullest jobs were glorified. The Homer Simpson at the National Grid waiting for 1.5 million kettles to be turned on at the end of EastEnders was bigged into the mission controller who copied the Eagle to Tranquillity base. The bloke who flies around checking electricity pylons spoke heroically of his sick bag. London Traffic Controllers were superhumans with the power to turn traffic lights green. This was as much a puff for Britain as Auden's Night Mail. If only it had its poetry.

Marr's sister programme on BBC Two about the transformation of London after the Blitz was less spectacular but more intelligent. Although its excuse was a repeat of a postwar RAF exercise to photograph the city from the air, this programme had a real tale to tell about Sir Patrick Abercrombie - so patrician that he wore a three-piece tweed suit and a monocle - who had wanted to rebuild London as a model city but was slapped down by the all too visible hand of commerce. No whims about the “oil of gossip” in this portrait of the plus ça change capital.

We have four years left to enjoy it before it is 2012, when it is destroyed in a nuclear attack. Such is the cheerful premise of Spooks: Code 9, which is to Spooks what Torchwood is to Doctor Who (ie, not as good).

With a cast of fresh-faces and a budget of several pounds, it fancies itself as gritty and hip, combining state torture with a boozy, flirty This Life house-share for the torturers, yet it lacks the balls to link the “code-9” attack with either the Olympics or al-Qaeda. A preamble assures us that, afterwards, life outside London continues much the same. Judging by the crowded Mancunian shopping malls, through which the junior spooks dash, this is indeed the case. Note also that in “new world, new rules” Britain, the pussy bow, dismissed by so many as just this summer's fashion fad, remains the height of post-holocaust chic.

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