'Skip E. Lowe Looks at Hollywood,' talk of the strangest kind, just shows how a little independence, energy, and sincerity - well, schmaltz - can give cable access a soul all its own.

He looks like a bare-chested imp, visible through a blizzard of snowflakes. His face, framed by a blond mop, registers a veritable compendium of emotions. He turns his naked torso to the right while the opening credits roll and theme music plays. Is he disclaiming or acting or singing? We can't tell because he's soundless. And this is just the opening title, shot long ago, now seen in nostalgic black and white.

When we see him again, moment's later, Skip E. Lowe is decades older, in as much color as public-access cameras can convey. His hair, now a yellowish gray, is combed back across his head and behind his ears. His is crisscrossed by so many lines it could be copyrighted by Rand McNally. We hear him talking, in a voice that occupies the niche between wheedle and whine, about some sub-People celebrity - Red Buttons or Shecky Greene or an actress of a certain age - recounting some of the highlights of his or her career with a mixture of admiration and delight. The background, devoid of furnishing or art direction,is pure black, blacker than Charlie Rose's nightmares. And then, as if by magic, said celebrity appears, sitting next to Lowe, sharing the blackness, and for the next half hour, Hollywood is fabulous again.

You couldn't pay me to watch most public access television. Oh sure, in the glory days of New York's Channel J, a naked interview with a porn star was good for a casual viewing or 20. but the original, high-minded idea of reserving a cable channel for the community has devolved into a "notice me/love me/follow me" soapbox for that specific slice of the population that's too proud to stand on the street corners with cardboard signs but too technically inept to create Web pages. "Skip E. Lowe Looks At Hollywood" - which for the past 18 years has been shown once a week on cable-access in Los Angeles and New York, tot he delight of intense ranks of showbizerati - is different. It's different from he rest of public-access in that it, and Skip, are actually interested in the people other than the host. It differs from the real Hollywood in that it is far more benign than the wholesale liquor business.

The format is achingly simple. Each week, cozy in his world of limbo noir, Sip interviews once celebrity for a half-hour that looks to be taped straight through: no stops, no fixes. As an interviewer, Lowe is no Matt Lauer. He makes mistakes about an interviewee's biography. "Shooting horses they don't," he once said to Red Buttons, hoping to hear an anecdote about Button's part in the film, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" This prompted Buttons to ask: "Are you dyslexic? So far, everything is backwards." The questions themselves are often almost dreamily vague, in the "Cyd Charrisse and dance...why?" mode. Subjects are most often addressed in the third person, as if Lowe is talking to their survivors, framing, elliptical inquiries like, "Stella Stevens: spiritual?"

But - and this is part of Lowe's attraction to the entertainers I know who regularly watch "Skip E. Lowe Looks At Hollywood" - his obsessions with show business has nothing to do with grosses or ratings and everything to do with big breaks and comebacks and wonderful evenings ion the theater. That is, it's a fairyland reading of an industry that has become crueler and greedier than it was in its Golden Age, whenever that was.

The show also violates a dominant esthetic of modern television, which is to keep the camera from getting too close to the face of anyone over 20. Skip and his guests don't even look as if they're wearing makeup. Nor does Lowe comport himself the way normal TV people do. He rests his chin on his hand, he leans towards us, he twists his mobile face into combinations of joy and sadness and wonder that gives new meaning to the word "scrunch."

But these aren't interviews. They're conversations, and the questions are basically prompts. The subtext for all the near-queries is Lowe's apparent conviction that even moderately successful performers have quite fabulous stories to tell and that this is the one place where all the fabulousness can come out.

Not that Lowe is a star-struck outsider. As the opening clip suggests, the gentleman has been around show business for quite awhile. From time to time, he'll drop hints about his past as a performer - a tour entertaining soldiers in Vietnam, a period singing and doing in Catskills, Los Angeles-based aficionados of the program also have the opportunity to see Lowe in person, playing host to a regular "talent showcase" that for the past few years has been held every Saturday night at the Comedy Store. There, one can see folks who style themselves as up-and-comers, who perhaps dream one day of graduating from being introduced by Skip to being interviewed by him. There too, if you are very patient and moderately insistent, you can occasionally talk Lowe into singing a piece of his own special material like the ruminatively plaintive and wistful "I'm Small." It was at one such soiree that the comedian Richard Belzer, attending in the spirit of irony, found himself videotaped and incorporated for a year or two in the opening montage of Skip's show. So much, Belzer decided, for irony.

Lowe has a good practical reason for resorting to intimacy as a style: if there's no set to look at you, you have to shoot close. But he also seems to want his face to be in ours, and by putting it there, he's realizing one of the great advantages of the medium. Like the early, huge, count-the-nose-hairs portraits by Chuck Close, television allows us to get in much tighter proximity to somebody that we'd want to, or dare to, in real life. THIS CLOSE to the real Skip E. Lowe, for example, and you wouldn't be musing about his view of hollywood as a wonderland. You'd be thinking, I smell his chewing gum and be casing the vicinity for exit signs. Every culture has its notion of how physically close you can get to another person, and in the same way, Channel J used to be a safe zone for violating societal codes of dress and speech, "Lowe" permits that unspoken code of proximity to be violated, for our entertainment.

There's something else about Skip E. Lowe I haven't mentioned, something that adds to his ineffable after-hour appeal, something that differentiates his programs from the late, lamented but stylistically more conventional "Joe Franklin Show" with its cluttered set and talk-show desk. You can find a clue in that Red Buttons interview, when Lowe was bemoaning the passage of the era when live shows with big bands co-existed in theaters with movies. "those were great days," Lowe lamented.

"You know you can make those days for yourself, Skip," Buttons urged, a playful smile growing on his face. "Get a cassette of the big band era and dance...with your girlfriend, with your wife, with your kids." Lowe laughed in the midst of this list; then, with a quick sharp intake of breath, he changed the subject - to the choreographer Michael Kidd.

Could mainstream television learn anything from this long-running fringe fixture? The question, of course, assumes that mainstream television is capable of learning anything, and from any source other than itself or its sibling, mainstream movies. "Skip E. Lowe Looks At Hollywood" doesn't so much re-invent television as de-invent it, returning it to those glorious days before focus groups, when the tube was safe for eccentricity and obsession. Regular TV could allow for such vagaries when the commercial formulas had not yet been ascertained and codified. Today,we're damn lucky that a quirky F.C.C. rule has made a modicum of room on the cable box for a show so much a product of individual passion, so lacking in the otherwise predominant reek of calculation. A fey fixation with show business would work in mainstream TV only if the character in question was a widower with two troublesome but charming teen-agers

Skip E. Lowe, on the other hand is still that same imp you see in the opening credits. He has just put on a shirt.

Added by Skip E. Lowe: "I just wanted you to know, that in the opening credits, that was Mickey Rooney from "A Midnight Summer's Dream"!! Not me! - Sorry Harry Shearer but thank you anyway. This is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me in ink (or in this case, on the web!)"