SOPHIA MONEY- COUTTS MODERN MANNERS Hum is where the hurt is at the cinema W

Why do so many annoying people behave as though they are in their own sitting room when they go out to watch a film?

hat could be lovelier, on these cold nights, than a trip to the cinema? My friend Katie and I decided to see Bohemian Rhapsody last Saturday, meeting for a pizza (each) and a bottle of wine (shared) before hitting up the Ben and Jerry’s counter at the Vue in Westfield (three scoops please). It was an indulgent number of calories but in weather as biting as this I imagine I’m a bear that needs to survive the winter, and has a fondness for pinot noir.

We took our seats, full and happy. The critics have mauled the film about Queen’s rise but I wasn’t fussed. They lauded The Favourite and I was far from bewitched (not a single likeable character), so what do critics know? We’ve had enough of experts...

After half an hour of adverts for car insurance and trailers, Bohemian Rhapsody started, but unfortunately so did a man sitting directly in front of us. Every time Freddie and Brian riffed a new track, this gentleman hummed along, ahead of time, reaching the chorus while on-screen the characters were still working out the melody. Katie and I shot one another A Look. Was he serious? It happened with every song. He’d hum along, then elbow his luckless wife and gurgle with laughter. People sitting in front of him started turning and glaring, too. But this chap – Queen’s most hard-ofhearing fan – didn’t notice. On he went. “I want to break free,” he crooned at one point. Didn’t we all.

I grumbled to my sister the next

The Favourite,

night and she told me she’d been to a screening of The Favourite (I didn’t warn her in time) where a woman let her two young children skip up and down the aisle for the duration. It did nothing to improve the film, she said. I wondered why the children were there at all, given the film has a 15 certificate. Were they perhaps very short, very hyperactive old men and my sister simply couldn’t see properly in the gloom? She insisted they were children.

The lowering of standards is not new. Long have we moaned about noisy sweet wrappers and the crunching of jaws on popcorn kernels. And in terms of grandeur, the cinema is a step down from the theatre and a certain amount of hubbub is expected – people thumping off to the loo, a phone screen glaring like a lightsabre because someone hasn’t checked their Instagram for 20 minutes. My mum once sat in front of two women who brought a cocktail shaker to a screening of Elizabeth, which was stretching things, although I think we can all agree drinks are very expensive at the cinema. But sitting through a film as if it’s your own private screening? I don’t think so. Perhaps the trouble is we’ve become too used to watching TV at home, and so treat the cinema as an extension of our sitting room.

My plan to rectify this is simple. Cinemas channel some of the sums they make from tickets into more staff, lined up the aisles in the manner of Thirties NKVD watchmen at one of Stalin’s speeches. Any noise or distraction, a single bar of Another One Bites the Dust, and you’re hauled out to face a forfeit. Finding an acceptable Northern Irish amendment to the Brexit deal, say, or being forced to watch on repeat.

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