I missed the broadcast, on the opening night of Channel 4 in 1982, of Walter, a play about a slightly retarded man and the way in which society dealt with him. Walter was played by Ian McKellen, and the role made him, if not a star, then at least a bigger twinkle in the acting cosmos. More than 26 years later, and now suffering from the more PC affliction of “learning difficulties”, Walter - again played by McKellen - returned on Saturday in Walter Now (Radio 4).

And both of them were brilliant - Walter because he had somehow managed to put up with everything a world out of kilter threw at him while retaining an enormous dignity, and McKellen because he showed that, when he puts his back into it, there is no part he cannot inhabit faithfully and movingly.

He was helped by a script by David Cook, who wrote the original TV play, that wasted no words and never slipped over into melodrama. Left to fend for himself and desperately lonely with the closing of the psychiatric hospital that he had called home, Walter found companionship - and a role as leader that he inhabited entirely convincingly - in a house shared with others like him, but much younger. I won't spoil the plot if you didn't hear the play on Saturday, but you really should hunt it down on Listen Again. You'll cry, and perhaps the next time a gentle stranger with something missing in his eyes comes up to you in the street you won't run away. Perhaps he wants to talk to another human being because he hasn't spoken to one in weeks.

Also on Saturday, also on Radio 4, The Archive on 4 was an exploration by Rory Bremner of the wit and wisdom of George W. Bush. It would have been easy for Bremner to have done no more than collect Bushisms and parade them for our amusement. But we've got the internet for that; instead, he and others attempted to analyse the rhetorical style of a man who, as one said, went to smart East Coast schools, attended Yale - and chose to present himself as a Texan rube with straw in his hair. Why? It endeared him to the voters, of course.

But there was light and shade to the Bush style. Mark Crispin Miller, the author of a book called The Bush Dyslexicon, said that the President “made mistakes only when dealing with subjects he didn't want to deal with. Whenever the subject turned to war, punishment or revenge (or baseball) he was perfectly coherent.” Thus on home economics, say, he was gaffe-prone: “If you're a single mother living in America, and you're working hard to put food on your family...” When it came to warning the Axis of Evil there was never a slip. OK, maybe this one: “I'm grateful for the chance to shake the hand of a man who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein.”

In the end, as Bush heads for the golf courses of the world, how will we remember him? “As a President of great rhetoric,” said one, “but not a great President.” Bremner tactfully failed to point out that the man speaking was one of Bush's speechwriters.

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