Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: A Manual for the British Malcontent - David Quantick - Страница 6

Evil places. They used to be huge, and now they are tiny. This is so they can cram billions more people in, and also means the screen is so small that people think they’re watching the telly with 75 strangers.

Cinemas are tolerable in the dark, but turn the light on and urghhh… the floor is strewn with trodden-in food, sticky with split soft drinks, and a death trap for people liable to slipping on popcorn. And the people! Half of them are mouth-breathing illiterates who laugh at jokes some ten minutes after the joke has been told, who explain the movie’s simple plot to their even simpler friends and who think that, somewhere on the film certificate they show as the movie starts, it says, ‘Please start talking in a loud voice now.’ The other half are Guardian-reading ponces who go to arty movies and laugh loudly at any feeble joke to show they get French humour. Somehow they are worse, possibly because they smell of carrot cake.

At least that’s something in favour of normal cinemas. They don’t sell carrot cake. They couldn’t, it’s too small. Normal cinemas only sell gargantuan food and drink, as though they’re expecting a party of ogres to come in and see Finding Nemo. The soft drinks are the size of nuclear power station cooling tanks (and just as radioactive). The popcorn looks like the grain harvest of a small Asian nation. And the sweets – a cinema-sized bag of wine gums is the size, weight and colour of a psychedelic sack of coal.

The reason the food crap and drink crap are so large is an obvious one; so they can charge more. A table for two at the Savoy Grill, with both of you drinking champagne by the vat, and having cigars after, and some caviar in a bap, would be cheaper than going to a cinema and having a large coke and plate of ‘nachos’ (old library tickets boiled in cornmeal).