In this newspaper a couple of weeks ago, the presenter Louise Minchin recounted her horrific stalking ordeal. She described the “blood-chilling” discovery that this man knew where she lived, and had stood outside her house. He made threats so terrible that she still has not let her husband see them, and she lived in fear that the stalker would hurt her or her daughters. She became terrified of strangers and existed “in a state of high alert – functioning, but looking over my shoulder constantly”.

This is not an experience confined to people in the public eye. As we were told in Stacey Dooley: Stalkers (BBC Three), one in five women – and one in 10 men – will fall victim to a stalker in their lifetime. The programme featured some of these female victims, and followed the work of both a charity helpline taking calls from desperate women, and a specialist police unit in Cheshire.

Almost 50 per cent of stalkers are former partners of the women they target. One included here was an airline pilot, who turned up everywhere his ex went; the fear in her voice on an emergency call was tangible. Another woman was bombarded with threatening messages from an anonymous man, including one saying he knew what school her young daughter attended. She discovered the truth when he sent her a photograph of her house from the pub car park across the street, and she obtained the pub’s CCTV footage. She was staggered to see it was her ex-boyfriend. “I couldn’t believe it. He was lovely the whole time,” she said of their former relationship.

Worryingly, half of those convicted of stalking re-offend. The police unit on screen here was doing its best, employing a psychologist and working with the probation service, but the system is far from perfect. Sabrina had to call the court herself to learn that her stalker had pleaded guilty.

There is another episode to go but this was not an in-depth investigation. Stacey Dooley documentaries follow a BBC Three template, which is to feature an awful lot of whoever is presenting them. Dooley is good at connecting with people and asking the right questions, but has a tendency to hog the screen; when a stalking victim played some threatening voice messages, for example, the camera was fixed on Dooley’s face as she reacted to hearing them. 

Dooley has her fans, and presumably BBC research has discerned that this is what they want. Having her name in the title means these shows are as much about the star as the subject.