Is a new art form being born on Woman's Hour?

In a comic-strip cartoon, beads of water apparently radiating outward from the head of one of the characters indicate embarrassment. Lines flying horizontally from a character, all in one direction and tailing off with distance, indicate rapid movement in the opposing direction.

Every western child knows this; but were you to show the cartoon to a Tuareg nomad in the Sahara, these ciphers — which are really more a form of hieroglyph than a depiction of any recognisable object — would be meaningless. Likewise in a film, cutting between scenes would totally confuse our Tuareg, who would wonder why we had apparently left one place and gone suddenly to another.

But we, who have absorbed these artistic conventions almost with our mother’s milk, hardly think about the fact that the film or the cartoon are not life as it might happen, but a specialised and stylised way of telling a story. Almost unconscious with us are the artistic conventions by which subliminally we translate the sounds and images presented to us on screens, in books and on the radio, into coherent tales of imagined reality.