Diary – 30 October 2010

The other day my husband and I went to Winter’s Bone, the much praised (overpraised, we thought) film set in Missouri. Both of us have normal hearing but neither of us caught more than about half of the dialogue. Naturally, we didn’t fully grasp what was going on. It was a familiar experience. In many films now, as well as in much television drama, the sound is muffled and the actors seem to mumble and slur their words. No doubt this is in the interest of authenticity. But what about comprehensibility? Plots today, particularly of thrillers, are hard enough to follow; not being able to hear properly makes it almost impossible. This has been going on for ages. When I edited a short book programme on television in the 1980s, the producers cared passionately about visual precision; they insisted, for example, that no contributor wore a stripy tie because this might cause ‘lens flaring’.