Radio Review: If a programme called The Reunionsuggests something saccharine and neat then you haven't tuned into Sue MacGregor's Sunday morning series on BBC Radio 4, writes Bernice Harrison.
It won a Sony radio award in Britain last week for the best speech radio programme of the year - some achievement given the crowded field - and this week's edition, the last in the series, was an uncomfortable, challenging listen.
The sit-down in MacGregor's studio was an exercise in reconciliation - a sliver of insight into the tortuous, grinding discussions that culminated in Tuesday's events in Stormont. In 1984, an IRA bomb planted by Patrick Magee in the hotel hosting the Conservative Party conference in Brighton killed five people. The programme's guests were Magee; Jo Berry, whose dad, Anthony, was killed in the explosion; Douglas Hurd, the former Northern Ireland secretary; and Harvey Thomas, the conference organiser. Norman Tebbit, whose wife was paralysed in the explosion, was asked to participate but refused (MacGregor read out his letter) to sit "with an unrepentant murderer who shows no remorse. To offer forgiveness is therefore a mockery". And who in their hearts could blame him?
The bomb had been planted three weeks before the conference, and Magee remembers feeling a sense of relief on hearing the news from the safety of a house in Cork. "Other feelings have perhaps taken decades to filter through," he said. "We were a people who had no other option but to take up arms," said the bomber, using the collective "we" and the tribal "people" that clearly still gives him a sense of righteousness but to these ears just sounds pointless and delusional. "There was jubilation in Belfast when that bomb went off," he said. "Among the minority," reminded Hurd.
Magee left a handprint at the hotel reception - not the cleverest thing to do if you have a finger missing - and he was, said MacGregor using the old bobby-on-the-beat term, soon "banged up to rights". "No," barked Magee, "I was a captured IRA man entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war." MacGregor, a cross between a school marm and a psychotherapist, challenged Hurd and Thomas for being "naive" in forgiving Magee. She got that right.
In this week's Documentary on One: Letter to Liz (RTÉ Radio 1, Wednesday) producer Ella McSweeney explored a different type of reconciliation and moving on. This time last year 4ft 10in Dublin woman Liz weighed 23 stone. She explained in very frank terms what it's like being that huge - from the impossibility of easily wiping her own bottom to finding a chair that fits.
She has traced - but doesn't entirely blame - her food addiction to the day when she was 10 and the sweaty old parish priest invited her for tea in the parochial house. You can guess the rest. Decades later a sermon from another priest, Fr Mick Cullen, helped her to start on the road to coming to terms with the abuse and to begin to save herself from an addiction that was killing her. She had a gastric band operation, can now only eat tiny amounts and is, she says, half the woman she was. "No matter what you do with your body you still want it to be different," said Liz, a woman who had decades of lonely comfort-eating to figure out what the burgeoning cosmetic surgery business so lucratively trades on. In the very entertaining I'm Doing It for Me(BBC Radio 4, Monday) presenter Geraldine Bedell drew a credible correlation between the growth in the popularity of hair dye and of cosmetic surgery.
In the 1950s only 7 per cent of US woman dyed their hair (it was thought to be a bit common), but by the time L'Oréal invented their "because I'm worth it" line in the 1970s, 40 per cent of woman used colourants. Now it's viewed as slightly eccentric - and not just in North America - for a woman in her 40s to let herself go grey. The plasticisation of women's bodies is on a similar trajectory, with a massive 50 per cent year-on-year increase in boob jobs and eye lifts in Britain in 2006.
It's driven, Bedell suggested, by surgeons who feel they can deliver, the media, the public, and the whole thing is underpinned by money. Last year Botox generated $1.4 billion (€1 billion) of business in the US. That's a lot of frozen foreheads. British Vogueeditor Alexandra Schulman hasn't had anything done. "I'd rather spend the money on learning a new language; it'd be more useful to me in my old age," she said. Mais oui.