The cause was last week's Documentary on One: A Father's Story. This was an unusual programme about Jerry Dennehy, who has cancer for the fourth time.

Such wretched luck is uncommon enough, but what made the programme singular was that it was produced and presented by his daughter, Susan Dennehy.

Over 20 years ago, when Jerry was 47, he had three-quarters of his stomach removed due to cancer. He didn't expect to survive the surgery. "I couldn't believe it when I woke up, " he said. "That was when I started fighting it."

His wife Brenda recalled the day all his hair fell out from chemotherapy. "He went up for a shower and I heard him shouting my name. All the tiles were covered in hair; his body was covered in hair. It all came out at once. He was like a plucked chicken."

Unbelievably, he made a full recovery.

"The doctor called me in and said 'you are a miracle man'. We are finished here.

You're completely cured'."

If you were hoping this story might end happily there, you could forget it. It was now around 8.15pm, and unusually dark, and unexpectedly cold, as Jerry described marching into his next battle, this time against alcohol. He had begun drinking heavily, mainly to relieve boredom as he couldn't work. "I realised just in time that it was either it or me . . . it was the very same as the cancer."

So he beat that demon too, but there were more to come. His son John was killed in an accident at 17. The two of them had been playing Scrabble when John went out for half an hour, and never came home. "He was my only son. I think he would have been a nice person, had he lived, " said Jerry. "I think that sudden shock does something to your body. It can't cope."

His body paid for the tragedy with prostate cancer. And just when he seemed to have vanquished that, it returned two years later. Then last year he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He now seems to have come to terms with the fact that a few more years is all he can hope for.

It's hard to know what Susan Dennehy's motive was in making this programme, unless it was to pay public tribute to her father's (and her mother's) remarkable bravery. But the most lasting impression was a nagging question as to why providence should make one family endure so much.

Luckily there was something of a comic remedy in the programme immediately afterwards . . . The Terrace, Ronan Kelly's new series recording "sounds and stories from an Irish terraced street". This is another show whose intention is unclear, though possibly it aims to present all life in microcosm.

The idea is promising, and it could turn into a sort of pioneering reality-radio soap opera, but Kelly would do well to stay out of things a bit more.

He found himself in the company of four women . . . Pat, Sheila, Ger and Frances . . .

who share a sense of humour so black that it swallows up all matter. Most of their yarns had to do with death, even the ones that weren't about death.

Two of them said they go to the shops together every day to buy scratch cards.

One said they never win anything, but the other disagreed. "I'm always winning. Do you not remember the time I won a thousand? My mother was only after being buried on the Wednesday. She sent it to me, I said, but then she had left me a double ESB bill when she died." They fell around at that.