It's a familiar technique, and documentary makers use it all the time: first, soften up your audience with a quick blast of statistics, then swing smoothly - or not so smoothly - into the story. In most cases the response is the same: you raise an eyebrow, kick off a slipper and shoot your expectations a stern look to stop them from getting too uppity. But not always.

Can't Read, Can't Write (Monday, Channel 4) began with two sharp blows to the head. 'Over five million people in the UK can't read or write well enough to cope in the modern world,' said a voice matter- of-factly, before adding, 'Every year, over 100,000 teenagers leave school without being able to read and write properly.'

One middle-aged woman described the mass of incomprehensible words that drifted before her as being 'like a big spider on the wall that you're frightened of'. Others were more prosaic. James, a 28-year-old plumber's mate who could recognise 'in' and 'the' but not much else, was asked how he would define his reading. 'Shit,' he replied morosely. 'And how does that make you feel?' 'Crap.'

Phil Beadle, 'one of the most controversial figures in education today', embarked on a six-month attempt to teach nine illiterate adults to read and write. Having said how controversial Beadle was, the programme proved oddly reluctant to provide any more details about him. Apparently, he had won a prize for his teaching methods, although when he admitted later that he'd failed every illiterate child he had ever taught, you wondered who had given him this prize and what the competition had been like.

Yet it soon became clear that Beadle was an unusual, impressive figure. Tousle-haired, good-looking and with a fondness for big spangly cufflinks, he became gloomier and gloomier as he looked at the government's adult literacy curriculum - 'absolutely horrendous', 'incompetent', handbags z 'completely wrong approach'.

The gist of his objections was that the courses placed no emphasis on phonics - how letters sound. Beadle's method, which he confessed he was making up as he went along, involved a primary school textbook, lots of repetition and attempting to create a tactile awareness of the shape of different letters.

At first, he got nowhere. This too had the dull clang of familiarity about it, of course, with the presenter going into carefully scripted agonies of self-doubt as his charges hurtle towards disaster. But in Beadle's case, he really did seem to be flailing helplessly about. Then Linda, a plainly intelligent, almost wholly illiterate woman in her late forties, suddenly started to see a link between the way letters looked and the way they sounded.

The moment when the first glimmer of recognition dawned in her eyes was wonderful to behold. But then the whole of Can't Read, Can't Write was as stirring as it was shocking. Mercifully free of saccharine gloop or the usual wolfish appetite for disaster, it just got on with telling its story in a crisply unmanipulative way. The result offered the extremely moving spectacle of these people being led, none too confidently, from darkness towards a semblance of light.

Travellers' Century (Thursday, BBC4) found Benedict Allen travelling in the footsteps of Eric Newby, author of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. We saw old footage of Newby running through the woods with his strange bounding stride, and heard how he had two distinct personalities: the urbane and the exotic. One of the reasons Allen did this so well, I suspect, is that there is something similar between him and Newby: Allen may not be a dandy, like his subject, but he plainly likes a well-cut white shirt.

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