Time to remove the hecklers who ruin live concerts for so many

We’ve all put up with them - the chatterer, the fidget, the drunk, the phone addict, and the downright annoying.

It takes just one person to ruin the evening for many. A night out you have waited to come round for ages - maybe a year or more - and you suddenly find yourself within earshot of an eejit.

I’m fairly lucky in that I can usually zone out of any background noise, but it’s hard to avoid them all. At a Del Amitri gig in December, some bloke and his mate talked all the way through it. They might as well have sat at the bar for all the attention they paid to the band, and that’s the bit I just don’t get - why fork out top dollar then yap away as if the stage was just a giant telly you could stick on mute while you went off for a pint?

So, the news that comedian Peter Kay booted a heckler out a recent gig gladdened my heart

The initial disturbance was a bloke who repeatedly shouted "garlic bread" during Kay's set. No sooner had he gone than a woman started to chant “we love you, Peter, we do!” It was her way of showing the star some support - nice but really not needed, and she found herself huckled by security.

As she went, the comedian compared her to Emmerdale character Lisa Dingle which left her “humiliated” - so humiliated she went on Good Morning Britain to say how humiliating it was.

The very fact morning telly pandered to her in the first place is just nonsense. Folk who get chucked out of gigs spoil, or, at worst, ruin entire nights out for those sitting around them and can de-rail the timing and momentum of a live set. They don’t deserve a second of any spotlight.

What they deserve is to be blocked from buying any more tickets to that venue. Take their card details, stick ‘em on a blacklist and give us all peace. There’s a voter winner for any wannabe MP.

There is absolutely no doubt that audience behaviour took a real nose dive after lockdown. Did we all emerge from the pandemic with no idea how to behave, or did it just create a selfish, self-centred society which can say what it wants, as loud as it wants and where it wants?

There is anecdotal evidence the same thing happened among theatre audiences after the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-20, only minus the ever present mobile phone screens lighting up the dark stalls. I’m coming round more and more to a total total ban on phones in theatres big and small - and spare me the “oh what about kids, what if they fall ill?” nonsense. They’ll cope the same way every generation did before mobiles existed.

The technology exists and has been enforced by several bands and performers. More need to follow suit. We have a generation with the attention span of goldfish, but least that’d get their full concentration on the stage, instead,

I can live with someone getting carried away in the moment - gigs and live shows are meant to do that to you - but when they act with zero regard for anyone around them then the only lights they should get to see are the ones marking the exit sign.