Daily Mail, May 2010
There was a hullabaloo at the end of our road on Friday night. It was so loud I went out take a look, and, as I did, other neighbours were opening windows and peering out in curiosity. And what was going on?
Well, nothing really, just a hundred and fifty or so teenage kids armed with mobile phones, all seeming to be talking and shouting into them at once, and generally having a good time on the first evening of their half term break.
Perhaps it was a flash mob, that modern craze where young people contact each other by email, mobile or Twitter and congregate at some place or other for zany enjoyment. I don’t know. But they weren’t doing any harm and soon dispersed.
So, good luck to them. It was a holiday weekend after all. But I can’t tell you how LOUD they were, or, more interestingly, how oblivious they seemed to be to the racket they were making.
Yet, hasn’t that been an increasing trend over the past few years? I mean, is it just me, or have an awful lot of us got considerably louder in public and less and less thoughtful about the sonic peace of others?
This struck me particularly forcibly at a concert I attended in London last week by the American singer Natalie Merchant. For several years Ms Merchant has been working putting a selection of children’s poems by people like Edward Lear and Gerard Manley Hopkins to music, and, supported by two acoustic guitars and a cello, this was the first night of her British tour
It was, I suppose, not unlike chamber music in its intensity, and was listened to very attentively by a couple of thousand fans of this very clever woman. And it would have been a perfect evening had it not been for an unfortunately plentiful scattering of ill-mannered people in the audience.
Spending much of the two and a half hour concert going in and out of the auditorium to the bars to top up their large polystyrene cups of beer, and then on to the loos where in the end they emptied them, they were like hyper-active children with the attention spans of goldfish and the bladders of babies.
I don’t think they necessarily meant to be rude. It probably never even crossed their minds that they were. But they were behaving in an extraordinarily discourteous way to the singer and musicians who stoically affected not to notice, as well as spoiling the concert for the majority of us who just wanted to sit and listen. And at £35 a seat it seems to me that isn’t a lot to expect.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. A couple of rows behind us were the inevitable loud whisperers who seemed to think that we would all like to hear what they were saying to each other, a couple of mutton-headed young women who, before the evening was over, began shouting out, demanding the singer do something other than the song she was already performing.
Every one of us has had similar experiences, no doubt some of us did over this holiday weekend. In the theatre actors and directors routinely despair of unruly chatterbox audiences, and friends who’ve been recently to the Royal Opera House have had cause to complain about the whispering there, too.
Even church services are no longer free of murmurings, while outings to the cinema can be a nightmare, with people eating, sucking, slurping, coughing, texting, translating, snoring and generally rabbiting on. Recently, unable to stand any more of hearing the young man behind me giving a running commentary on what was happening to the avatar on screen, I turned around and put a finger to my lips.
His response was to call me a…
Actually, I can’t tell you what he called me, other than to say that it involved what is generally regarded as the most offensive word in the English language. Mind you, he did shut up after that, so it was a price worth paying.
But how has this happened? How is it that a very large minority of people have come to assume that it’s perfectly all right for them to chat all the way through concerts, films and plays, apparently unaware that such anti-social behaviour drives the rest of us to distraction?
One guess is that it’s the consequence of people brought up in homes where the television is always left on, so that anyone wishing to make conversation has inevitably to be louder than the TV or else they would never be heard. The end result, though, is that live flesh and blood performances by singers and actors are treated no more respectfully than images on a screen in the corner of the living room.
Mobile phones haven’t helped either, with their users seeming to believe they have to shout to be heard above the ambient sounds of street or train.
Of course, very occasionally this can provide unexpected entertainment. Several years ago a journey I took to Liverpool was much being enlivened by my having to listen to a young woman recount to her boy friend the plot of a film she’d just seen. “It was called Titanic, about a big ship”, she explained as she began going through the plot. “And, you know, it sank. They nearly all died. Honest!”
Such accidental amusement is, however, rarely cited by actors. Once it was members of the audience reciting famous speeches not so sotto voce that sent them mad. Now it’s the careless saboteurs of a performance.
When Kevin Spacey was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile phone while appearing in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, he famously broke off from his speech, said icily “Tell them we’re busy”, and then continued with the play.
I like to think that the owner of the mobile was chastened, but, I suppose, it’s just as likely that he or she was actually thrilled to have attracted the attention of the great man.
There is, perhaps, another explanation for the increase in general public noisiness and casual rudeness. I call it the “L’Oréal…because I’m worth it” factor, after the television advertisements for hair products.
I don’t know how aware of the wider ramifications the advertising agency that came up with that campaign was, but it seems to me they put their finger right on a current malaise in modern society when they coined the phrase “because I’m worth it.”
Think about it. What is it really saying? That we are a selfish and vain lot with a view of the world that says we’re entitled by our very humanity to have our every whim and desire satisfied ‒ “because we’re worth it”.
And you only have to extend that creed a little bit to understand why some people will, when hungry, eat hamburgers on Underground trains, thus reeking the carriage with the smell of onions, no matter that no other passengers will want that, or casually talk and drink and guzzle their way through a concert.
“It’s a free country, isn’t it,” has long been the doltish default rejoinder to those who’ve dared question behaviour which, while perhaps not necessarily unlawful, upsets others. And since moments of possible confrontation are hardly the best circumstances in which to debate the balance of liberties (“you’re free to talk at a concert, so long as you don’t infringe my freedom to listen”) it seems to me the loud-mouths not only rule, they grow in number. Depressing, isn’t it.
Now I know there are those who will tell me that theatre audiences have traditionally been rowdy places, that Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe could be raucous affairs with the audience joining in, jossing the actors ‒ even chucking vegetables at them when they didn’t like the performance.
And I’m sure that is so. But I’m not living in the sixteenth century. I’m living now. And I want to hear what I pay to listen to, not a vacuous cacophony by the brutally bad mannered.
