Looking For Dad (C4): Watching The Detectives (BBC1): TRYING to find your long-lost father and dealing with the violent death of a loved one are difficult enough, emotionally, without having cameras peering over your shoulder.

But there seems no shortage of willing volunteers to expose themselves to this kind of intimate TV experience.

Looking For Dad began with the startling statistic that 40 per cent of fathers lose all contact with their children following family break-ups, and that doesn't take into account men who disappear before the child is born.

Kim and Gemma are teenage sisters who've never known their father. He left when they were still babies after an acrimonious divorce. Their mother Sue, with whom they live, erased every trace of him, even cutting his image out of photographs in the family album.

Now her daughters feel the need to meet their father, to find out why he hadn't attempted to see them or fight harder for them when the marriage broke up. They tried locating him through the Internet and missing persons charities - without telling their mother, afraid of her reaction.

When she found out, she did her best to understand, but feared for her own relationship with them. "I love them and am scared there's going to be a tug of war," she said.

Sue was worried her ex-husband would bombard them with love and attention, but vanish again when the novelty wore off. A tearful Kim felt optimistic that he'd stick around. "That's what I want to believe. I don't believe someone would walk away twice," she said.

It took people finder Ariel Bruce, the series' consultant, to track him down and a reunion took place - unseen by viewers as dad Gary, now remarried with a new family, asked for the camera to leave the room, leaving voyeuristic viewers feeling cheated.

The problem didn't end with the girls meeting their father, as the issue of who's to blame for their lack of contact with him persists.

In Watching The Detectives, we followed a South Yorkshire Police case from start to finish in Sheffield where, we were told, every day five people are victims of serious assault.

A 24-year-old male student was attacked on a garage forecourt, fell to the ground and later died in hospital. Of course, we only got an edited version of the investigation, with months of police work condensed into 60 minutes, but enough to gain an insight into the massive amount of expertise that goes into bringing criminals to justice.

This case had the added dimension of the reaction of the victim's family who were told, after the evidence was reviewed, that the charge would be manslaughter, not murder. Unclear CCTV footage and witnesses who hadn't seen everything meant that murder couldn't be proved.

This was all fascinating stuff for the viewer, while the distressed family may have felt it some compensation to air their grievances publicly. The man responsible, who was jailed for two years for manslaughter, is now out of prison.