EVEN as a euphemism, “complex needs” is laughably inadequate. Anyone listening to Complex (Radio 4, Monday of last week) would find the challenges facing seven-year-old Nora and her family exasperating and overwhelming; and yet her parents, Tors and Dave, who present this three-part series, stagger on, empowered by love and duty.

Nora suffers from a rare disorder that renders her blind, non-mobile, non-verbal, and subject to seizures. We heard how the disabilities gradually revealed themselves during infancy; but this is principally an account of coping: over the three episodes, Tors and Dave take us round the three environments in which their lives are conducted: the home, the healthcare system, and the hospice.

In last week’s opening episode, the parents managed a building project, necessitated by Nora’s having outgrown bathroom and bedroom. We learned about the Disabled Facilities Grant — what it would, and, more importantly, wouldn’t pay for — and the all-too-familiar frustrations of building regs. All of this is done with an admirably light production style, even as a powerful message emerges about the need for reform in this area of social-care provision.

I suspect that Radio 3 will be playing more Schoenberg this week than during the past two years put together. The music of this notorious revolutionary does not fit snugly with the broadcaster’s ever-increasing inclination toward congeniality; but birthday obligations force upon it a dedicated series of Composer of the Week. As a preamble, Kate Molleson presented Serial Offender: Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve tone adventure (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week), the inspiration for whose title came from a Viennese newspaper that, in 1908, reported on the première of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet in its crime column.

With the help of some impressively articulate experts, Molleson gave us a case for the defence. Much of the problem lies in the 12-tone compositional technique that he pioneered: a technique more easily caricatured than explained. But, as Paul Morley argued, the sound-world discovered by Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School has become the world inhabited by film-music composers ever since. We have no problem with atonality when it is accompanying a thriller or sci-fi flick. None of this, I suspect, will convince the programmers on Radio 3.

There is a problem in describing the phenomenon of awe. Either we must skirt round it by the via negativa or we must dramatically raise our lexical game. The title More Wow (Radio 4, weekdays of last week) does neither; and it sets the tone for a series that hopelessly fails to match up to the subject matter. Thus, Jo Marchant’s description of a star-filled night in Mexico sounds banal, while her cave-diver guest flirts coyly with the spiritual dimension of awe: “There is definitely something.” The most vivid image from the series was far more comic: of mice sent up into space and desperately clinging on to the sides of their cage as they experienced zero gravity.