Is it time to start slapping selfish audience members?

It’s 1965 and we’re sitting one afternoon in the South Wimbledon Odeon (or Gaumont or ABC), me, big brother, mother and aunt, watching Operation Crossbow, an untaxing war movie starring just about everybody, when a half-dozen teenagers start playing up down the front.

This goes on for a few minutes until an usherette approaches and shines a torch at them. They quieten down for a bit, but eventually start up again – jeering, blowing raspberries, throwing stuff, etc. 

This time, my brother gets up, walks down to them and quietly asks them to desist. One of the oiks cheeks him. My brother walks along the row the miscreant is sitting in, smashing the knees of his companions as they scramble unsuccessfully to get out of his way, and slaps the yob across the face with an open palm. As Gronmark Major turns to leave, one of the two girls in the group complains, “There was no need to ‘it ‘im!”. My brother tells her that if she doesn’t shut up, he’s quite prepared to slap her as well.

A spatter of applause from the other patrons is followed by a blissfully noise-free half hour as the film concludes. The teenagers slink out past our group, eyes averted, in case the bloodlust of the hefty 20-year old in the big white cable-knit sweater hasn’t been sated.

Back then, of course, my brother’s actions seemed perfectly reasonable (as they were). Now, he’d be maced by a SWAT team of zealous police officers, hauled off to prison, and probably charged with manslaughter and mental cruelty. Still, I’m pretty sure that, given the same circumstances, he’d do the same thing all over again: we Gronmarks believe in our right not to have our enjoyment of films, plays, operas and classical music spoiled by selfish, inconsiderate, antisocial bozos.

I gave up regularly attending the cinema – which I love – back in 1980 after a large gang of knuckle-draggers spoiled The Shining for me and my girlfriend by running up and down the aisles and letting off bangers in a cinema in Paddington, unchallenged by any member of staff. Since then – apart from kids’ movies, where you sort of expect a certain amount of audience inattention - it’s been videos, DVDs, Sky Movies and the occasional trade screening. 

I decided to give up attending rock concerts after some friends very kindly invited us to a Sheryl Crow gig at Wembley Arena. I’d done my back in a few days earlier, so could barely stand up, but, determined not to miss the event, I guzzled some painkillers and hobbled across West London. Within one minute of the toothsome Ms Crow taking the stage, the whole audience rose as one and remained standing for the next 90 minutes. As I was physically incapable of doing likewise, I spent the time staring at the back of the bloke in front of me. (Still, the music was excellent.)

I last attended the Opera seven years ago, on my 50th birthday. Since then, the psychedelic cost of tickets and the tininess of the seats has precluded further visits – but at least the audience is usually well-behaved.

As I have written previously, outdoor classical music concerts, where patrons feel no inhibitions about settling 

down to a nice, noisy natter, can be a bit of a trial, but I have always found the indoor variety a civilised experience – until last night. We attended a superb British music prom, which started with a terrific 1929 work utterly unknown to us – Dynamic Triptych by John Foulds (who was earning a living as a silent film accompanist in Paris at the time he wrote it, and who evidently had absolutely fab hair). 

It continued with a magical performance of Vaughan Williams’s lovely (albeit slightly sugary) Serenade to Music. 

Then disaster struck. 

During the interval, two blithely selfish young women replaced the nice middle-aged couple who had been sitting alongside us in the front row of the Grand Tier box we were in. One of them – who, judging by her sheer bulk, barely held in check by a striped rugby shirt, suffered from either a severely underactive metabolism or extreme greed – sucked noisily from a straw stuck into a vat full of some brownish liquid, while her pallid, slouching, concave little companion reached into her pocket every minute, without fail, to get out her smart-phone, read what was on the screen, nudge her bloated companion to share the contents, and indulge in a bit of a chuckle and a chat.

They did this, unrelentingly, throughout the fourteen minutes it took for the conductor Donald Runnicles and the Scottish Symphony Orchestra to play Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, one of the most sensitive, transcendental and beautiful works of classical music this country has ever produced, and a particular personal favourite.

I was tempted to follow my brother’s example and threaten to batter both of them, but we were someone’s guest, and that would have been rude, so, feigning discomfort, I disappeared to the back of the box before the start ofElgar’s Symphony No. 1, and, positioning my chair so that the man in front acted as a sort of human Leylandii to shield me from the sight of Little & Large, settled back to enjoy a truly inspired performance. I’ve never been that big a fan of the Elgar, but the Scots fully converted me. What a glorious work!

I’ve already given up too many of life’s pleasures thanks to the solipsistic inconsiderateness of mannerless, cultureless morons to add live classical music to the list. Over the years, I’ve stifled my irritation with percussive coughers and those fools who start clapping just before the last note is played, to show just how well they know the work. 

And I suppose I’m just going to have to somehow find a way to enjoy the performance of music which rewards fierce attention while in the company of people who can’t concentrate on anything for more than thirty seconds and who lack the imagination to understand how their behaviour might be affecting others, or who just don’t care.

But I do sometimes wonder why it’s always the heedful, considerate majority which has to accommodate the pig-ignorant behaviour of the mindless minority, rather than the other way round. 

As I get older, what often masquerades as tolerance begins to look more and more like cowardice.