RADIO / Accusations and guilt

TIME, as is well known, heals wounds: but it also has a useful way of taming art - taming your reaction to it, anyway. The avant-garde can have an unpleasantly medicinal taste when you swallow it straight: but sweetened with 25 years' worth of nostalgia it can be a positive delicacy. If Peter Handke's Self- Accusation (Radio 3, Friday) was made now, you suspect, you'd be reluctant to touch it. Rooted up out of the archives, for the closing stages of the 1968 season (stifled gasps of relief all round), it seemed a kind of radio truffle.

Part of the joy was the comfortingly starchy Third Programme announcer, who explained that this was a Sprechstuck - a 'play on words'. Handke, apparently, was trying to create 'a new form of drama in which language becomes autonomous': or, to put it another way, 'dramas without images, insofar as they give no image of the world'.

What this meant was that two actors (Denys Hawthorne and Margaret Robertson) shared a kind of liturgy describing a single narrator's progress from birth onwards ('I came into the world. I became. I was engendered. I came into being. I grew. I was born. I was entered into the registry of births. I grew older.') We went through the processes of learning movement, perception, self-consciousness, speech, etc, up to the punchline: 'I went to the theatre. I heard this play. I spoke this play. I wrote this play.' It's that Teutonic sense of fun: you just can't keep it down.

The picture of a developing mind was persuasive; but the central theme was the learning and systematic breaking of rules, beginning by spitting at pretty well everything and everybody. It wasn't clear if this was meant to be a triumphant catalogue of rebellion or (as the title suggests) a shamed confession; but the flouting of convention looks a thing of its time. The sound was very Sixties, too - drama school accents, jazzy percussion background.

What made it compulsive, though, was the austerity of Handke's concept, and the way that he stuck absolutely to that original idea of a world existing only in the words. It had a sense of purpose missing from two superficially similar programmes heard recently. In Caryl Churchill's short Identical Twins, another 1968 archive production, broadcast the previous Friday, Kenneth Haigh and a two-track tape recorder put on a virtuoso performance as Teddy and Clive ('They look alike, and they sound alike'). But the ingenuity didn't disguise a certain indecision - what was more important, playing out the relationship between the two indistinguishable voices, or constructing a plausible plot?

At the other end of the scale, Leigh Landy's Rock's Music, heard on Radio 3 last Sunday week, had the composer and another two-track tape recorder in a layered recitation of words by Gertrude Stein ('Such a pretty bird. Not to such a pretty bird. Not to not to not to not to such a pretty bird. As to as such a pretty bird, and to and such a pretty bird, and to as to not to and such a pretty bird . . .'): surprisingly listenable, but finally vacuous.

Through Martin Esslin, who translated and directed this version, Handke seemed to have something to say, and a way of saying it: it broke most of the rules for good radio, but it had reasons for doing it.

Silent Daughters (Radio 4, Sunday) was about the rules that should never get broken. In 1991, Karen and Bob discovered that their three daughters had been sexually abused by Bob's father. Reporting him to the police set in train a succession of traumas - including not just a trial, but a retrial which delayed this programme by a month - and created a web of tensions, resentments and grief too tangled, you feared, for the family ever to sort them out. Parents, children and Bob's mother talked freely to Jenni Mills about their various pains, of which the sharpest seemed to be the children's fear that they would not be believed.

This programme didn't leave you much room to doubt them. The hallmark of Mills' programmes with the producer Sarah Rowlands - including the excellent Never the Same Again - is the sympathy they extend to their subjects, and the artfulness of the interviewing and editing, there for anyone with ears to hear, but too cleverly constructed for you to feel you're being manipulated.

Perhaps no amount of craft could soften the impact of a story like this. Before it began, the announcer warned that 'The programme contains material which some people may find disturbing': you wondered who wouldn't find it disturbing, and hoped it wasn't anybody you knew.