Perverse public performance

These people need to be stopped before it's too late

National treasure Rosamund Pike made the news recently for calling out a theatre goer who was texting; not only during her performance but during a crucial, emotional scene in Inter Alia. If it’s good enough for Ros, it’s good enough for yours truly. So let’s have a few words¹ about people who don’t know how to exist in this world.

I know, Rozzie, I’m aghast too. Credit: The Guardian

People who appear to have been teleported in from another realm, completely oblivious to societal norms, are nothing new. When I was a mere slip of a lad, I remember Big Poppa Holmes often flipping his lid at the old double-parking-and-ducking-into a-shop routine. “Don’t give me that ‘my hazards are on’ bollocks, mate,” went the call. “You’re the only hazard around here!”

After wandering this earth for nearly fifty years, I have come to believe that selfishness is a baked in fundament² of the human condition. Although it’s definitely been turbocharged over the last decade.

I remember going to see Gravity with The Muse back in 2013. A film that really hammers home the vast emptiness of space, as a spectacle it is largely silent and completely engrossing. Except, what’s that over to my right? Why, it’s some fucking chimp playing on its phone.

He wasn’t just occasionally checking his messages, he was full on scrolling his socials. He wasn’t invested in the film at all. Just get up and go down the pub pal, that’s what I did in The Pelican Brief (the only film I’ve ever walked out of). But no, he sat there leaking his wretched blue light all over Sandy B’s travails.

As in so many other well scripted films, Gravity has a lovely third act twist. At the exact point of said twist, The iPhone Berk actually took a call. “Hello? Yeah, I’m in the cinema.” It was like Trigger Happy TV never happened³. Because this was years before my enlightenment, quiet seething gave rise to incandescent rage in a nanosecond.

At normal speaking volume in a completely silent cinema, I said: “Mate, you are taking the piss now!”

The phone disappeared like I had cast Expelliarmus and a dozen or so people around me undoubtedly said silent prayers of thanks in their heads. The other 200 people in the auditorium, however, just thought I was just a thicko who didn’t understand the film. Unbeknownst to me, a friend of mine was sat on the other side of the room; on the way out he collared me and said “I knew that was you! I can’t believe you hated that bit!” My protestations fell on deaf ears.

So yeah, I’m used to the clueless oafs who wander among us. Don’t forget that I used to deal with them all the time. However, something broke during Covid, and like so many other things that broke during Covid, as a society we haven’t stopped to take a break from raging at each other for long enough to fix it.

The theatre seems to suffer a lot at the hands of these whoppers. Ducking back to me old mate Rozzie for a bit (because I’m a storyteller, you see - deftly ducking back and forth is what we do), she is clearly blessed with grace and poise that I can only dream of, because she waited until the end of the show before coming out and delivering an impromptu lesson on etiquette:

I just wanted to say for anyone going to the theatre, it’s a huge thing that we’re trying to give you. I am trying to tell you a story, and I’m feeling you, and I hope you’re feeling me too.

Somebody was texting [down there]. You know who you are and I’m not going to single you out.

Maybe it was very important, and maybe you’re a doctor, and you’re saving someone’s life, and I hope you are, but we do see these, we do feel them. I’ve got you, I feel like I’ve got to hold you all, so when I feel that and see it, it’s hard.

You’d like to think that the guilty texter felt sufficiently chastised, and might consider not being so monstrously selfish next time they’re shoving posh ice cream down in their gullet while watching a national treasure. But that isn’t always the way.

None other than the great Kenneth Brannagh recently fell foul of the sort of rampant exceptionalism that makes most of us curl up and die inside. During a recent performance of The Tempest at the RSC’s Stratford-upon-Avon theatre, audience members were taken wholly out of their experience by a baby in their midst. This lovely quote sums up the pure Britishness of the experience:

Audience members at a matinee performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production, starring Kenneth Branagh as Prospero, complained after a baby gurgled and cooed its way throughout the entire first half.

The mother and baby were reportedly asked not to return for the second part of the performance after audience members at the RSC’s Stratford-upon-Avon theatre asked for refunds.

“There was a young woman with a baby in the audience – and it mithered all the way through the first act,” ticketholder Sian Morgan told the Daily Mail. “Thank goodness there was never any actual screaming or crying, but it was gurgling and cooing and chirping very loudly throughout. It never let up.”

Morgan added the child appeared to wake up during the opening scene. “Theatre audiences generally are very tolerant and progressive, but it was ruining it for everyone as it made it so hard to concentrate – and by the end people were audibly tutting and turning around to show their displeasure,” she said.

Props to Sian for slipping ‘mithered’ in there. One of those wonderful words that I always feel like I can’t get away with because of my brutish southern tongue.

The thing that got me with Tempest Baby⁴ is that, according to reports, the mother was convinced she was doing nothing wrong. In fact, she considered the gaggle of people complaining about her actions to be the unreasonable ones. I’m no fan of mob justice, but that’s mental, right? How can it be that the few can sit there and confidently dismiss the many? Dunning-Krueger is a plague and it is spreading.

Truth be told, I am not much of a theatre goer. Sitting quietly in a darkened room while someone else gets all the attention? No thank you, sir. But this sort of behaviour is not restricted to the theatre. The very worst societal kink in recent years doesn’t happen in the theatre. It happens in the pub.

And the pub is most definitely my scene.

The pub is both the most British and least British place you can visit. Respect, mutual admiration, friendship, bonhomie - it’s all there. And yet, we don’t have to behave like we’re anywhere else. We’re not quiet like we are on a train, we’re a little less considerate than we are in other settings. The pub is organised chaos.

There is a quiet combat at play; the quest to slake one’s thirst is actually a genteel battle, lowkey survival of the fittest. You’re on your own at the bar, depending on nothing more than your own wits and a keen eyed bartender. Know who was in front of you and stake your claim. That’s what we do.

What we don’t do, ladies and gentlemen, is meekly queue up like we’re in the fucking post office.

Stop it, stop it now. Credit: Nottingham World

I can just about forgive this sort of thing somewhere like a Loungers. If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably got a local Loungers. It’ll have a name like Legato or Beretta or Nosferatu and it looks like a quirky little indie gaff at first glance. But they have nearly 300 establishments up and down the land, all of them striving to have their hybrid café/bar/restaurant cake and eat it⁵. Apparently founded by two students who didn’t have the perfect Goldilocks joint in which to spend all day hanging out. So they created a Frankenbar.

People queue in a Loungers because it’s not quite a bar, despite the most bar-shaped bar you’ve ever seen dominating the room. Everyone knows the rules, because the staff tell them. My local Loungers has a brilliant crew and is a lovely place to while away an hour or two with my laptop. Over the last few months, I’ve become known as ‘the writer’ - I am, in fact, writing this piece at my usual table.

No matter how much they may wish otherwise, Loungers are not pubs. Pubs are pubs.

A couple of weekends back, the Muse and I moseyed down the towpath to our local taproom. Not a traditional pub, it is nonetheless a room with a bar, TVs and pool tables, staff on their toes, and lots of lovely beer coming out of shiny, chromed taps. It’s not exactly Ye Olde Red Lion, but it’s certainly not Morrisons, either.

The Champions League final was on, so as well as the rogues’ gallery of regulars sat in the summer sun dispensing their usual wit and wisdom, the place was full of people who don’t go to the boozer very often. I clocked Mr Pint O’Soda as soon as I walked in. You know the guy: rocks up early and claims a table for four, then proceeds to nurse his solitary softie for the next two hours. Way to keep a community hub thriving, mate.

I spectacularly mis-timed my round and went inside to get more drinks on the stroke of half time. And I saw them. I saw the Snakers.

A column of twenty or so haunted souls, stood in a straggly line from the bar to the fire exit, waiting in bovine line like refugees from a dying planet, acres of prime bar space going unclaimed.

A queue. A fucking queue in the fucking pub.

You people make me sick. Credit: Daily Mail

The phenomenon of vertical queueing in pubs is a pox upon the United Kingdom. The Metro calls it ‘snaking’, I call it completely unacceptable. It must be wiped out immediately.

Confronted by a conga line of the damned, I did what I always do: I strolled up to the bar.

Now, as all true Brits know, if you attempt to skip a queue in an actual queue-based setting, you can expect to be called out in the standard manner: “Oi, mate. There’s a line.” Throw your thumb over your shoulder for good measure. I’ve done it myself plenty of times.

When I blanked the straggling Highway to Hell, no one said a word. Guys bigger and scarier than me, with a scant fifteen minutes to get their pint in before they went back to braying at the telly. They could’ve bum rushed me right into the Thames. Yet they stood there, quiet and still like statues. Because Snakers know in their bones that they are wrong.

The trad press blame snaking on Gen Z because of course they do. But it is worse, and a lot more deeply ingrained, than a few kids who don’t know how to pub properly. If it was just Gen Z we could stamp it out immediately, but it’s rampant across all ages and demographics.

This shit only started six years ago. Everything changed thanks to the Covid pandemic, but those days are long gone. The masks are away, the perspex is down. So why do the queues remain in pubs? Your memories can’t be that short, Snakers.

I hear with depressing regularity how pubs in the UK are on their knees. People are drinking less, costs are skyrocketing, the government rinses them for every penny. But lads, you’re only making it worse when you let the Snakers do their snaky thing.

With so much wrong in 2026, the last thing we need is for our great drinking establishments to fall to the Snakers. Publicans: take control, assert some authority. At the very least, put a fucking sign up. We love a sign! Whatever it is, just get a grip. Because if you don’t sort this farce out, I will.

I will appoint myself the Bar Tzar, and I will travel this great land hectoring queues of idiots in pubs until they form a disorderly horizontal rabble like the good old days. I don’t want to see an inch of vacant bar, I want that beautiful space crammed with bodies. I’m not a violent man but I’ll carry a cattle prod if that’s what it takes to get you people shoved up to the jump.

That’s more like it. Credit: The Guardian

And you know what? I shall recruit an army, starting today.

Boozehounds of Britan, stand up and be counted. We must purge the Snakers from our holy lands. Reclaim our hallowed pubs from this scourge. Get this great nation off its knees by returning the pubs to their untidy glory. Bring back the melee, the chaos, the comfortable, gentle confusion. That is the natural state of the pub, and it must be restored forthwith.

The Snakers cannot be allowed to win. I am the new Saint Patrick, driving the snakes from our holy lands. Join me on this righteous quest.

The fightback begins today.

Vive la résistance!

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1. Yeah, okay mate, whatever. You regularly clock in well over 2000 words these days. Shut up, Inner Voice.

2. Yes, the dual meaning is deliberate.

3. If you never saw Trigger Happy TV, it was a comedy show created by Dom Joly in 2000. One recurring skit saw Joly answering an oversized Nokia in incongruous settings. Clearly ahead of its time.

4. That’s a brilliant band name, added to the list.

5. Loungers do cake too, of course. Delicious cake, obviously