MENTION LOCAL-ACCESS TV, and the average person tends to think of Wayne and Garth jamming heavy-metal tunes from their basement. But despite its reputation for kooky content and subpar production standards, the oft-maligned medium is generating an entirely new set of minor media stars: politicians. Pols have long gotten face time on the municipal channel when the camera swings their way at council meetings or ribbon-cuttings. Now, however, it’s getting hard to turn on these channels without seeing a candidate, though they’re still sandwiched between shows about how to go trash-picking for furniture and readings aloud from the Somerville Journal (helpful if you’re blind; Chinese-water-torture-boring if you’re not). Some ambitious pols have their own talk shows; others frequent an entire line-up of programs (targeted to viewers as diverse as political junkies, Greeks, and gays) where they can make their mark with various constituency groups.

“I get a lot of feedback,” says City Councilor Peggy Davis-Mullen, who is mounting an uphill mayoral campaign this year. “It’s a great way for anybody elected to talk to the public.” That’s particularly true as commercial ad rates keep rising and mainstream-media attention to local politics diminishes. “Coverage of municipal government is nonexistent” on local TV newscasts, says Emily Rooney, host of WGBH’s Greater Boston. “Part of it is that it’s not as interesting as it once was during the days of Ray Flynn and Kevin White, really combative mayor’s races, when something was always going on in the city council that had a ripple effect in the community. But it’s a chicken-and-egg situation, because how would we know, since no one’s covering it?” Joe Heisler, who hosts the political program Talk of the Neighborhoods on the Boston Neighborhood Network (BNN), agrees. “I think, over the years, the networks have cut back their coverage of city issues, and that creates a niche for me to exploit,” he says.

This fall, for the first time in eight years, there’s a contested mayoral race in Boston. All the city councilors are up for re-election. Same in Cambridge, where candidates vie for nine citywide seats. Somerville’s mayor and board of aldermen will also face the voters. Local-access TV will never take the place of door-to-door canvassing, or even paid TV ads on more-prominent stations. But with candidates fighting to make an impression on voters — particularly in the race to succeed the late Joe Moakley in the Ninth Congressional District, which is far juicier than municipal elections — it’s becoming an important part of the campaign arsenal. Just ask Boston mayor Tom Menino and every at-large member of the Boston City Council, who are only a few of the pols to hit the local-access airwaves in the past month.

SO WHO’S watching this, anyway? Since Nielsen ratings don’t cover local-access TV, numbers are elusive. In fact, the only hard numbers available are for potential viewers, since the shows reach every home with cable. In Boston, that’s about 160,000 households; in Cambridge, 24,000; and in Somerville, 20,000. A 1996 study by the City of Boston showed that 30 percent of cable subscribers interviewed watched local-access programming, and that the average cable household consisted of 2.3 people — but the survey talked to only 468 viewers.

“I wish in some ways we did know [ratings], but maybe we’re better off not knowing,” says Heisler. He adds wryly, “We got six calls tonight, so at least six people were watching.” Says Chris Lovett, host of BNN’s Neighborhood Network News, “Sometimes on my bad days, I think it must be the same 10 people watching.” But on the other hand, he jokes, the people who keep coming up to him in the supermarket at least look different.

A small number of die-hard community activists watch local-access programming religiously — and it’s a smart move for pols to keep them informed, because they’re also likely to vote. But the shows reach far more people who are just clicking through the channels. “A lot of times you get picked up channel-surfing,” Cambridge city councilor Michael Sullivan observes. Says Glenn Koocher, who hosted the well-respected political show Cambridge Inside/Out from 1989 to 2000, “Our success was that people would tune us in as they worked their way from Channel 2 to Channel 4.” The shows are repeated so often that a lot of surfers will see a politician’s face and name on the screen, even if it’s for only five seconds — longer than some are willing to watch paid campaign ads.

A number of pols ensure their exposure by hosting their own programs: just like anyone else, if they pay the small yearly fee ($60 in Boston) and sign out the camera, they can hold forth to the masses. “Media does well on covering the three state leaders [the Speaker of the House, the Senate president, and the governor], but if you’re a state rep, you’re totally invisible to anyone,” says State Representative Pat Jehlen of Somerville, who has been hosting a monthly program on Somerville Community Access Television (SCAT) for nearly five years. “No one knows how you vote, what bills you sponsor, and what you’re working on.... [The show] is an opportunity to let people know what I’m working on.” Recent programs have discussed insurance reform, Fenway Park, and Tufts University’s dispute with its custodians.

State Representative Alice Wolf of Cambridge, Jehlen’s Beacon Hill colleague, began a similar program at the beginning of the year on Cambridge Community Television (CCTV). Wolf — whose State House phone number and email address flash across the bottom of the screen — considers it “another forum to talk to constituents” about subjects like the MCAS test and how Cambridge politics has changed over the years. Cambridge city councilor and state representative Tim Toomey also has a monthly program, as does Congressman Mike Capuano, who films his shows in Cambridge and airs them throughout the Eighth Congressional District, in Boston, Somerville, Belmont, Chelsea, and Watertown. Suffolk County clerk of courts John Nucci has a weekly program on BNN.