IN A week when straight religious programmes asked big questions about eternity, infinity, and death, the most profound meditation of all came from the mouth of a self-pitying, cantankerous Irishwoman in pursuit of redemptive sympathy. Mrs Rooney — the central protagonist in Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall (Radio 4, Holy Saturday) — is not interested in the great theological questions. Given the rare opportunity to question a Regius Professor of Divinity, she asks whether Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass’s colt, or a hinny.

But her journey to and from the railway station, expressed in a mixture of uncharacteristic naturalism and absurdist ritual, takes on all the resonance of a tragic pilgrimage.

It is hard to imagine now a BBC prepared to commission a radio play such as Beckett’s All That Fall. But this was 1957, and this first drama after Waiting for Godot is as much a classic of the genre as Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, a few years earlier. In this new version, the director, Max Stafford-Clark, knocks off a good ten minutes from an original, which now sounds almost liturgical in its reverence for Beckett’s pace.

The slightly quicker delivery, combined with vastly more convincing sounds of the countryside, made this version a more appropriate entry-point for those encountering Beckett’s classic text for the first time.

Unlike Waiting for Godot, All That Fall concludes in melodramatic fashion. Yet there is for ever something menacing as well as mournful about Mrs Rooney’s journey. Schubert’s quartet “Death and the Maiden” provides a hint from the very start, and the death of children remains a leitmotif throughout.

At the conclusion of one of her disjointed anecdotes, Mrs Rooney quotes a doctor, speaking of a deceased girl in his care: “The trouble with her was that she had never really been born.” Like the best of Beckett, the line incorporates both a touching simplicity and a poetic profundity, drawing force from biblical allusion. It is good, once in a while, to be reminded of how good radio drama can be.

Pascal’s admission that he was terrified by “the eternal silence of infinite spaces” has a Beckettian ring to it. But the message of Anders Sandberg’s edition of The Essay (Radio 3, Holy Wednesday), in which Pascal was quoted, was not of fear but of aspiration: that, in response to ever lengthening life expectancy, we must teach ourselves to love life. Fear of death, he declared, was not a good enough reason to extend life.

We should take this man seriously; for he works at a place called The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

Sandberg was contributing to a series, Desperately Seeking Eternity, in which writers discussed how “modern technology threatens to undermine our traditional ideas”. Enterprising though these essays were, I am not sure that any of them convincingly demonstrated the premise, let alone how we might negotiate these challenges.

Naomi Anderson, for instance, told us about the mathematics of infinity, and how contemplation of larger and smaller infinities might help us with our understanding of God. But, as she demonstrated, this was not a modern concept: Spinoza was irritating people with just these ideas centuries ago.