TV: We're all too familiar with the corrosive power of unquestioned authority, its ability to warp the most inoffensive people into adept torturers

If you can imagine an amateur production of Lord of the Flies played by nuns you'll have something of the atmosphere evoked by "Sex in a Cold Climate", a depressing contribution to the growing body of Pious Atrocity films. Previous contributions to the genre have taken the form of drama and documentary but the main identifying feature in all cases is the presence of a uniformed religious order that operates a regime of studied and sanctimonious heartlessness. In the case of Steve Humphries' film for Witness (Channel 4) the institutions were the Magdalene Asylums, run by the Catholic Church in Ireland to house "fallen women". This description was fairly broad in its coverage - naturally, it included girls who had become pregnant out of wedlock or who had worked as prostitutes, but a knowing disobedience of the church's teachings on sexual morality wasn't a necessary condition of incarceration. Martha Cooney was sent to one after being indecently assaulted by a drunken cousin and reporting the attack to another family member. Her indiscretion was taken to be more of a problem than his abuse, and it was "solved" by a form of internal exile. She didn't fall, she was pushed and she found herself in a kind of ecclesiastical gulag. Back then, the women were made to wash dirty religious linen without pay; now, 40 and 50 years on, they were doing the same thing, only in public.

Four women recalled their experiences in the film, and while their account was necessarily anecdotal it was all too believable, even in its more lurid details. There might have been a time when an account of a nun wrapping a leather belt around her fist before administering a beating would have been attributed to malevolence on the part of the teller; perhaps the more devout viewer will still attribute such stories to the machinations of Satan. But the consistency of the tales told and the distress their recollection still causes offered some kind of corroboration. Besides, we're all too familiar with the corrosive power of unquestioned authority, its ability to warp the most inoffensive people into adept torturers. Add religion and you have an even more volatile spirit - one in which cruelty is justified as kindness from the perspective of eternity.

The most painful of these stories was that of Christina Mulcahy, who was separated from her baby when he was just 10 months old. The nuns destroyed her letters to the father and, if he wrote any, his to her - ensuring that a family could not be patched together from this inauspicious beginning. When her child was taken from her she had no authority to which she could appeal, the dispositions of the church being effectively beyond contradiction. In any case, her own family had disowned her and colluded in her treatment, the Magdalene Asylum offering a grim, brick-built carpet beneath which the embarrassments of rural Ireland could be swept. Fifty years on, despite a subsequent marriage and a family she was allowed to keep, she still wept at the memory of that separation. Another woman did the same when she recalled being sexually abused by a priest in the confessional, an assault against which she could not protect herself; those who might have prevented it from happening either didn't believe it or didn't want to. The legacy of this treatment was hardly surprising - a bitter hatred of the Catholic Church and its teachings - though it was notable that one of the woman most sinned against still had a statuette of Christ on the radiator behind her, his arms spread wide in benevolent acceptance. This film was entirely historical in its accusations but it seems all too possible that equally dreadful things are still being done in his name.

The Net (BBC2), a sprightly magazine programme for Web surfers, included a remark that would be balm to technological regressives. "The fact that it is a non-linear work tends to destroy the narrative," complained Rob Miller, co-creator of Myst and Riven, and thus a star in the world of computer role-playing games. This is a rather obvious point to those of us who think that a book still represents the best form of interactive entertainment available, but the fact that it is filtering through to heroes of the computer generation is oddly comforting.