Body Shock: Wild Child (C4): Hear The Silence (five): A GIRL found living in a kennel is caught on camera on all fours, barking like a dog and lapping water from a tap with her tongue.

A mother wants to know why her young son has stopped speaking, become unusually vulnerable to disease and is no longer the happy child she knew.

These were two images of childhood in two different programmes about sick children and the efforts to get to the root of their problems.

The opening images of the barking girl provided a shocking start to Wild Child. Oxana, from the Ukraine, had been left outside by her alcoholic parents and formed a bond with the family dogs.

A concerned neighbour brought her plight to light, raising the question: are children shaped by nature or nurture?

Oxana, who'd had little contact with humans, could hardly speak. She copied the habits of the creatures around her. Surrounded by dogs, she became more like a dog than a human.

Wild Child told of other feral children, for the problem is not as limited as you'd think. Scientists have long been eager to explore the phenomenon but are restricted by being unable to set up experiments with children. They can only learn from cases brought to their attention.

An American doctor who introduced a chimpanzee into his home was alarmed to find that instead of the animal becoming human, his 18-month-old son began displaying monkey characteristics.

Modern technology can show doctors how a child's brain has developed through lack of proper human stimulation. What can't be done as easily is changing society's attitude to feral children. Oxana, for instance, lives in a home for the mentally ill despite doctors' efforts to rehabilitate her.

A feeling of hopelessness also permeated Hear The Silence, a drama-documentary centred around the MMR debate. This was a brave attempt to put a human face on the subject, through the stories of a mother of an autistic child and the gastroenterolgoist who first spotted the potential link between the vaccine and regressive autism.

Occasionally, you felt the drama grind to a halt for the facts to be explained to the viewer. But no one could complain if it erred on the side of the mother and doctor rather than the politicians, funders and other medics lined up against them. They had enough difficulty getting their voices heard in real-life that they deserved a chance here.

Having two top-notch actors, Juliet Stevenson and Huge Bonneville, in the leading roles helped tip the scales in their favour, too.

The mother's despair at the succession of closed doors encountered as she set out to discover "why this happened to him" was agonisingly depicted by Stevenson. Bonneville's doctor became increasingly world-weary as his bid to publish a paper on the vaccine came up against hospital officials and politicians.

Published: 16/12/2003