SPECTATOR or participant? In recent decades, the Church and all other purveyors of serious entertainment have sought how to engage their audiences far more viscerally in the action, transforming them from being passive observers, held at arm’s length by the impassable barrier of proscenium arch or choir screen, into essential contributors, central to the creation of a shared enterprise.

Of all the great art forms, surely the peaks of classical music would be the most impervious to this development? Might BBC Proms: Beethoven’s Ninth Unwrapped (BBC4, last Friday) be as close as we can get? The whole first half dramatised the genesis of the work, particularly in relation to Beethoven’s deafness. Paradoxically for a concert, hearing loss was central to the concept: excerpts from the composer’s conversation books — his only means of communication — were acted out and signed.

We saw how this most transcendent of symphonies was created by an impossible and curmudgeonly egoist. His all-encompassing idealism by no means included his unfortunate helpers, and especially his nephew.

The conductor, Nicholas Collon, did everything possible to bring the vast audience into the action. His Aurora Orchestra’s trademark of performing everything from memory, standing up, meant that, instead of being anchored in one spot, its members could be marshalled into small groups, moving around, grouping and regrouping to play first this theme, then that counter-melody.

Bit by bit, the whole symphony was built up, not as something abstract and remote, but as something central to our experience, too, relating to the composer’s personal pains, agonies, and, despite everything, overwhelming joy. We became partners in the realisation, sharing in its utterly dynamic flowering, eventually achieved through profound, costly struggle, as idea after idea was tried out, and then developed or discarded.

For an encore, Collon scattered his players and singers throughout the auditorium, reprising the final section among and alongside the audience. I am sure that they danced home, transported to an unimagined plane. I can’t wait to hear about the new expressions of worship which it will surely inspire.

Engagement and communication were central also to The Seal Whisperer: Our lives (BBC1, last Friday). Ben Burville, a GP, has developed a remarkable rapport with the Farne Island seals: he dives among them whenever he can, and has observed and filmed some astonishing behaviour. He never approaches them, just hovers near by. Eventually, out of playful curiosity, they come to him.

Communication and engagement are problematic for the heroine in the series Platform 7 (ITV1, from Monday of last week), not least because she is dead, now haunting the surprisingly well-kept and overstaffed railway station on whose tracks she met her end. Necessarily mute and invisible, she slowly pieces together her tragedy, the true villain being entirely obvious from the outset to all who have ever read or seen a thriller.