Having just won a big prize at the Sony Radio Awards, the Radio 4 series The Reunion ended with something of a bang on Sunday when Sue McGregor reunited victims of the Brighton bomb with one of its perpetrators.

McGregor's guests were Jo Berry, daughter of MP Anthony Berry, who died in the explosion; Douglas Hurd, then secretary of state for Northern Ireland;

Harvey Thomas, producer of the Conservative conference who was trapped for two-and-a-half hours but escaped uninjured; and Patrick Magee, the man who planted the bomb at the Grand Hotel in 1984 in a vain attempt to do away with Margaret Thatcher.

Norman Tebbit, the then trade minister whose wife was paralysed in the blast, was also invited to appear and sent a letter angrily explaining his refusal to "sit down with an unrepentant murderer".

Without Tebbit the vitriol was conspicuous by its absence. Jo Berry found inner peace in India in the 1980s and doesn't hold grudges. Harvey Thomas follows the Christian path of forgiveness and Douglas Hurd is just, well, Douglas Hurd. Had Tebbit been there the wound might have reopened but, as it was, everyone was more or less on the same side.

Tebbit was also moved to write a piece in the Telegraph the day before the broadcast accusing the BBC of staging "yet another love-in" with a terrorist.

He wrote: "Now it seems we are to be encouraged not merely to accept Mr Magee as a respectable human being but to admire and, most sickeningly of all, to like him."

In justice to Magee, however, he makes very little effort to get you to like him. But if you can't admire him, neither can you doubt his sincerity, and despite the almost heroic magnanimity shown by his two victims in the programme, Magee was the one you most wanted to hear from. He said he would never ask for forgiveness. "As a thinking human being, I made decisions and I stand by them. I don't think I deserve to be forgiven."

There were more excruciating confessions on Wednesday's Documentary on One (RTE Radio 1).

Letter to Liz was the story of a Dublin woman who was abused by a priest as a child and went on to develop an eating disorder. Her weight had reached 23 stone when she decided to have gastric-bypass surgery. Something in this programme echoed all those American daytime TV shows about morbidly obese people . . . there's a top note of sympathy but beneath it you can hear the ringmaster and smell the sawdust.

Ella McSweeney was gentle in her questioning but also embarrassingly probing. She wanted to know which part of herself Liz liked the most, and which the least, and whether it was difficult for her to see herself naked, and how easy it was to go to the toilet.

"Oh I can go to the toilet, " said Liz who seemed naturally unreserved. "It is cleaning yourself up afterwards that is very hard. I am being very descriptive here but I might have to use a towel sometimes."

Liz's weight is now normal and she has found love and "last week two builders actually gave me a wolf whistle". No doubt she surrendered her dignity to RTE for the sake of helping others who have been grievously wounded by abuse, so let's hope for her sake it was worth it.