Years ago there was a comic routine involving Cissie and Ada (aka Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough) where the two middle-aged women went to an art gallery and started giggling over a statue of a naked man, focusing especially on his personal equipment, so to speak.
Andrew Graham-Dixon's bold experiment took the same idea and gave it a serious twist. Several paintings at Tate Modern were miked up so as to record the reactions of visitors viewing them. There were some fascinating results, telling us a lot about how viewers appropriated works of art and used them to make sense of their own lives, especially during times of crisis and/or emotional trauma. Among those interviewed were a family with a young child, a gay couple who had been through a civil ceremony, and a mother and her trans-sexual son.
If nothing else, the program reminded us of why art is necessary; it is a way of encouraging imaginative and spontaneous identification, prompting us to reflect on ourselves and our relationship both to the pictures in question as well as to the world at large.