LIKE Mom's apple pie in America, or warm beer in Major's Britain, public access television is regarded as A Good Thing. And then you watch Takeover TV (C4, Friday) and realise that there are worse fates than the Reithian elitism of Broadcaster Knows Best. Takeover TV is introduced by Adam Buxton, a man in black leather with a TV aerial attached to his beanie. This is a fair indication of what is to follow.

The show is a home-made comedy revue, a magnet to the sort of garden shed hobbyist who's convinced that he has bags of personality, it's just that no-one he knows has noticed yet. Most of these would-be Steve Coogans were male, funnily enough (though there was that woman who played a harmonium ablaze with fireworks). It's amateur stuff but, once you discount the problems with focusing, no worse than the standard sketch show fodder. You know the type of thing: skits on the test card, the Natural Law Party, and Attenborough-style nature programmes. Most turned on those old favourites, toilets and violence. Sex, that limitless comic mainspring, was conspicuous by its absence - unless it involved Barbie dolls.

There was a spoof on Reservoir Dogs involving copious quantities of ketchup; an ``egg snuff'' movie in which three eggs painted with suitably trepidant expressions were ``executed'' in ingenious ways; an auto-evisceration using butcher's offal; and a sketch where a man impersonating a child blew his brains out with the gun from a cowboy set (moderate quantities of ketchup). We also witnessed a short film about bulimia featuring a heavy breathing soundtrack, three Barbies and some fairly convincing synthetic vomit. So has Takeover TV anything to offer those outwith the psychiatric profession? Strangely, the answer is yes. I was fascinated. It's not often that you get to see adults playing, and it turns out that adult play has just the same surreal cruelty, the same capacity to create its own wierdly believable world, the same mix of unknowingness and showing-off, as children's make-believe. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out.

A more conventional route to public access is the Community Programmes Unit, responsible for the harrowing The Day That Changed My Life (BBC2 Monday). Michael Gerwat was born prematurely but with faculties intact. The hospital gave him 100% oxygen and he went blind. He overcame the disability to enjoy a flourishing career as piano tuner to the stars, working for some of the biggest names in rock. One morning, while eating breakfast, he heard a pop. And nothing else. He was stone deaf. A virus of the cochlea, apparently; something anyone could catch.

This was such an extraordinary painful porgramme that you wondered how it had ever reached the screen. In women's magazines the jargon is ToT (triumph over tragedy); the rule is that without both elements of the equation the story doesn't make the page. And there was precious little triumph in Gerwat's story. ``In that moment I lost me. In that moment I lost everything I'd ever known, in that moment I lost an entire world. I lost my mobility, I lost my dignity, people treated me as a cuddly bear or they wanted to run away from me.''

Using Gerwat's own, highly articulate, voiceover to guide us through his story did not make for comfortable viewing. He was furious. With the benefits system, with the friends he was now dependent on, with the former friends who prayed for him, with the unfairness of fate. However understandable his bitterness, his refusal to don the mask of stoicism did awaken an ignoble impulse to run away. As he rocked and cursed in frustration at his inability to hear a much-loved Genesis track, his rage had the overblown rhetoric, the faint false note of anyone who speaks in a vacuum. This was the most painful sight of all. He had lost his capacity to gauge, and engage with, others' reactions. Only when touched did he know he was not alone.

His wife faced the world with a half-smile as heartbreaking in its way as her husband's anger. ``He was really fun to be with,'' she recalled quietly. They had six months of relatively normal wedlock; now she is his ears and eyes, communicating via a language of taps on the hand and a Braille computer. A cochlear implant, 22 wires in place of millions of dead connections, allows him limited conversation at social gatherings, which is something, but not nearly enough.

We are told that Princess Diana is planning to use England's forthcoming anti-stalking laws against the paparazzi who dog her every move. Good luck to her, but the celebrity shadow, whether motivated by warped passion or straight financial gain, is the minority face of stalking. Most are known to their victims; jilted by boyfriends or the sort of freak who's as likely to meet his obsession in the supermarket as on the big screen.

The grim fact brought home by Inside Story: Stalking the Stalkers (BBC2, Wednesday) was how easily eternal devotion slides into grievous bodily harm. Beneath the Mills and Boon mythology, the stalker and his or her victim (in 75% of cases, his) are engaged in a struggle for power. Among the cases being investigated by the LAPD's Threat Management Unit were a bit-part actress whose ex-boyfriend wasn't prepared to let the relationship drop, the Power Rangers ``star'' whose stalker believed they were characters from a comic strip, and a woman whose erstwhile lover had left a perfect dental impression in her cheek. He had pursued her for six years. A true romantic.

Stacey Tasker used to run a prison wing whose inmates included the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the Cambridge Rapist, Dennis Nielsen, and Jeremy Bamber. Which made visiting Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors an idiosyncratic experience. ``All I could say was: `The Cambridge Rapist doesn't look anything like that.' ''

But there's a price to be paid for being able to namedrop celebrity criminals, as Law Women (BBC1, Tuesday) made clear. The chief drawback - though Tasker was far too profesional a public servant to say so - was having to implement Michael Howard's crackdown on the ``hotel'' regime of Britain's gaols. Out went Christmas Day Black Forest gateau and prawns. In came the ``two-box rule'' drastically reducing the permitted amount of prisoner property, and a host of other petty restrictions. The unanswered question at the heart of this documentary was what are prisons for? The punishment is supposed to be the deprivation of liberty, not the prison regime itself, but that seems to have gone the way of so many other principles under the Conservatives. Incidentally, the food budget at Maidstone Prison is #1.37 per inmate per day. Not exactly the Ritz.