The week on Radio: A messy business, this thing called life

Everything leaks. We ourselves begin life leaking out of every available orifice, and we carry on leaking all the way to the grave (even there, we don't stop for a while). Our control may improve for a while in the middle, but we can't ever hope to stop the leaking altogether.

The knowledge of life's leakiness is the basis of most farce: the protagonists have a secret to keep, but false moustaches fall off, cupboard doors won't stay shut, lavatories won't flush, careless words are dropped, and bit by bit secrets trickle out, respectability dribbles away.

Joe Orton's Loot (Radio 3, Sunday) is a classic example of the form, with its complex machinations involving stolen money, an embalmed corpse with loose-fitting artificial eyes, a bank robber who is constitutionally incapable of lying, and a thinly disguised policeman. Orton's innovation is that the parties with the secret to keep are thorough-going criminals rather than put-upon bourgeois; the audience is invited to sympathise with Hal and Dennis's straightforward criminality rather than with the cringing Catholic respectability of Hal's father, or the state-sponsored viciousness of Inspector Truscott.

Lindsay Posner's production, broadcast to mark the 30th anniversary of Orton's death, was a remarkably effective piece of farce - the swift pace and comic impact suggesting that radio need not be afraid of visual humour, only of humour that's been insufficiently visualised. And the fine performances, particularly Debra Gillett as the briskly efficient serial murderer Nurse McMahon and Timothy Spall as Truscott, emphasised Orton's individual ear for language - the deliberately Wildean paradoxes (why won't Hal attend his mother's funeral? "It would upset me" - "That is what funerals are meant to do"), the cadences of rigidly pious grief, the occasional obtrusive adjective (Hal describes his partner as "a very luxurious type of lad"), the baroque banality of sexual fantasy (Hal's list of the various sizes and nationalities of the "birds" in the perfect brothel).

All in all, Loot emerged as an engagingly watertight piece of comic craftsmanship. It didn't come across as a critique of society, even as possessing a consistent moral viewpoint, and in another 30 years, when the Swinging Sixties have become as irrelevant as the Naughty Nineties or the Jazz Age, one suspects it will look pretty arthritic. But, for the moment, it's looking spry enough.

More leakage in the first programme of Not Just a Pretty Face (Radio 4, Thursday), a new series about the Miss America pageant: this time, the way that childhood leaks into our adult lives, how we fail to contain pain. Jean Snedegar told the story of Marilyn Van Derbur, Miss America 1958, who went on to become one of America's most highly regarded public speakers. But, as always, the American dream has its dark underbelly: in this case, the revelation that Marilyn had been raped by her father regularly from the age of five.

This is a powerful piece of irony but, in the end, that single irony was all the programme had to offer. Marilyn's account of her traumas had been rehearsed to blank perfection. Whether this was a symptom of America's culture of self-revelation, or a technique for coping with the awfulness of her life, the effect was to reduce her story to a trivially shocking anecdote.