SOS: desperately seeking a wet nurse... or a pelican, radio review Early in the history of the SOS, the BBC decided not to publicise the outcome of "private anxiety," but now we heard from people who had been summoned to the bedsides of their dying relations, from Linda Miller, the subject of an SOS message at the age of six, and from the newsreader Alice Arnold, who broadcast the messages in the 1990s. No record exists of the messages" demise. Mortally stricken by the mobile phone, they fizzled out some time in the late 90s. But this moving and intriguing programme provided a fine memorial. The unspoken assumption of the SOS was that the dying would be comforted by the presence of their loved ones. But in Hearing Ragas (Friday, R4) Professor Paul Robertson sounded thoroughly put out to have been summoned back to life from a deep coma. Professor Robertson, a physician and founder member of the Medici String Quartet, was working with the composer Sir John Tavener on a string quartet, Towards Silence, when both men fell dangerously ill. Tavener had an intimation that this would be the last piece he would write: "The music just seemed to arrive," he recalled. I don't understand how I wrote it. Both men were powerfully aware of their unconscious minds continuing to work in ways that were wonderful and terrible - the title referred to an exquisite raga that Professor Robertson heard while comatose, but he also suffered hideous visions of being tormented by devils smelling of aftershave ("They tried to shave you in hospital," his wife remarked laconically). Their conversation was a remarkable testimony from the valley of the shadow of death, where Professor Robertson had been tempted to linger until called back to life by the sound of the Mozart clarinet quintet. "Would you choose not to have been ill?" he asked Tavener. On the whole, they agreed, they had found the experience of suffering oddly enriching. As we heard in Saturday Drama: Blasphemy and the Governor of Punjab (Radio 4), an impulse to relieve the plight of a woman facing death proved fatal for Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, who was shot by his own bodyguard in Islamabad on January 4, 2011. Taseer, a self-made millionaire who once cheerily remarked that the good thing about being rich was it meant he didn't have to bribe himself, had been leading a campaign to amend Pakistan's blasphemy laws and took up the case of Asia Bibi, an illiterate Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy. The ensuing furore was all the more startling for Taseer because it began with a hostile interview with him by a young Westernised female journalist who had been taught by his wife. The BBC journalist Owen Bennett-Jones presented this utterly compelling fusion of reportage and drama. His interviews with Taseer's family were unbearably dignified - the only moment his widow wept was when describing her meeting in prison with Asia Bibi. It is human nature to wish to second-guess the workings of destiny, and historian Juliet Gardiner began her 10-part History of the Future (yesterday, Radio 4) with the observation that we can learn a good deal about our ancestors from what made them anxious. The famously gnomic Oracle of Delphi, the subject of her first programme, scored a bullseye with its advice to the Athenians to rely on "wooden walls" - or ships - to save them at the battle of Salamis. The Oracle eventually succumbed to political stability, but happily for the superstitious, human anxiety never diminishes - it just moves on.