Two women, differently possessed by demons, have been haunting me since I saw them on telly this week.

One is Becky, the 31-year-old shoplifter in Cops and Robbers (9pm, Mondays C4) and the other is the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

They might have little in common but they both ended up staring out at me, blank-faced as moons.

Cops and Robbers continues to promote the West Midlands as a work vacuum (see Benefits Street) by filming persistent petty criminals on the streets of Dudley. You might have seen a picture of Jason “Stokesy” Stokes’ mug, accessorised with a baseball cap and spliff, outside Dudley Magistrates’ Court “my third home” [along with prison and the local nick].

In this new four-parter we meet some of the offenders who commit 90 per cent of street crime and the officers with the unenviable mission of tempting them to go straight.

Typical underclass-as-reality-telly fodder, yes, but the documentary is nicely done, with just a tinkle of incidental music we could do without.

The police, including Sergeant Clive Steedman, come across more like painfully patient, liberal and frustrated careers advisers than cops as they try to cajole their “one-man crimewave” into an honest living.

You might be surprised these criminals allow the cameras to film their ducking and diving until it becomes obvious they have nothing to lose. Stokesy, who at 27 is a bit old to be a juvenile delinquent (the closest he gets to looking scared is when he’s chased by a swan while riding a motorbike in the park), loves the attention.

Prison is no deterrent (“it’s a holiday with free telly and three square meals”) and he gets a buzz spending other people’s money that he likens to crack.

Becky on the other hand has nothing to lose because she’s already lost it all. She offers no comedy or boasting as she describes her upbringing – routinely strip-searched as a child – and her four kids, all taken into care.

Her mother’s face is scooped out by pain as Becky scrounges £20 to buy a bag of heroin to numb the pain for an hour or so. The haunting moment comes when the police mugshots of Becky are shown in quick succession (there are so many of them) like a flicker book. The smiling teenager morphs into a hollow-eyed addict as hope and energy saps out of her face.

Meanwhile, BBC4 has “gone abstract” and if this art-loving branch of the Beeb sounds a bit crumpets-and-slippers, think again. Polka Dot Superstar: The Amazing World of Yayoi Kusama filmed the 85-year-old artist preparing her manic dot paintings and trippy mushroom, pumpkin and dog sculptures for a Tate show. Most infuriatingly, fame seems to mean journalists treat her like a vaguely amusing pet, giggling at her odd and sometimes half-witted answers as she hobbles about. The programme does point out that, for all the joyful capitalism of her work, the never-smiling Yayoi’s work comes from a dark place – hallucinations she has suffered since early childhood and which mean that, for the last 40 years, she has lived in a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch.

“I went to a field of violets and the violets had human faces and started talking to me,” says Yayoi of a childhood vision. “I became scared and ran home. On the way a dog started speaking.”

But the must-see is Yayoi’s 1968 film Self-obliteration. This is nightmarish, pulsating viewing. At one point, you see a young Yayoi daubing dots on a canvas in a lake, before it sinks, and she’s stabbing at the surface of the water like a woman possessed.

At other points, she’s sticking dots on naked friends, animals, trees and herself with a basket-case look in her eye.

This is a bad trip worth watching but if you’re not troubled by these millions of dancing pixels, your life is clearly even unhappier than Yayoi’s and Becky’s.

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