Time for jammin' sessions in theatres and concert halls

We’ve all heard it. During a wedding or a funeral. At a tense point in a play. In a quieter moment of a symphony. A good film. The wrong time, the wrong place.

Brnnnnng-brnnnnng. Or worse, a downloaded pop tune-as-ringtone.

Like everyone else, you look around. Who is the idiot that didn’t turn off their mobile? You glare at the culprit as they retrieve the phone from pocket or handbag. So now the ringing becomes even louder as they (always) stare at it, seemingly deciding whether to take the call before turning it off.

In some truly gob-smacking occasions I’ve seen people actually take the call.

New York Philharmonic conductor Alan Gilbert apparently had had enough of this nonsense a year ago when someone’s mobile went off just 13 bars before the end of Mahler’s Ninth (not a symphony to be messed with).

Gilbert halted the symphony and vented, gloriously, at the offending individual. That off his chest, he turned back to face his orchestra, raised his baton, and played through to the conclusion.

It later transpired it was a preset alarm going off on the culprit’s iPhone – but the solution would have been the same. If he’d turned off his phone completely, not kept it on “silent” (it is not silent in the case of alarms), the alarm would not have gone off.

These frustrating and increasingly commonplace incidences – to which I will add the lunkhead who has to check texts or emails in a darkened theatre or concert hall, distracting everyone for seats around with the light from their screen – prompt the question of why we can’t just block mobile signals in such places.

Many people incorrectly think the technology isn’t up to it. It is. Mobile phone jammers – including portable units – are widely available. They work by sending out radio waves at the same frequency as that of the mobile networks, disrupting the signal.

Legally deployed

In some countries, such as France and Japan, they can be legally deployed by owners of theatres, concert halls, cinemas and similar venues. But due to laws drawn up decades before the existence of mobile networks, jamming a mobile signal is illegal in the US, UK and Ireland.

In the US this is thanks to a 1934 act, which decrees that disrupting a signal is in effect denying operation of a licensed service. In Ireland, according to regulations dating from the 1920s, a person cannot use a “wireless telegraphy” device to cause “interference to apparatus which is lawfully licensed or lawfully operational without a licence”.

Ireland had the honour of getting worldwide attention back in 2004 when the owner of Dublin’s Savoy cinema installed a blocking device. The communications regulator ordered that it be removed. When the same cinema group asked permission from ComReg to install blocking devices a few years later, it was again told no, not unless the mobile operators agreed to allow their signals to be blocked. Fat chance. The operators have staunchly opposed blocking signals in venues even though emergency signals would still be available. This is idiotic.

Why does someone have to be contactable during a performance? Few events go more than 90 minutes without an interval, during which people may go out and check their phones or bleepers.

A personal situation, or desire to text someone mid-film, does not override the right of an entire audience to enjoy an event, nor does their job pre-empt that of the other professionals doing their job at the actual event, be it performing in a concert or marrying two individuals.

Surely, given the ubiquity of modern technologies with the ability to disrupt, it is time to reconsider old laws and allow some places where we can be mobile-free, be it a concert hall, a church, a cinema or designated cars on a train .

Guerrilla actions

Otherwise expect more guerrilla actions by exasperated citizens. I have a soft spot for a guy in Philadelphia named Eric who was caught last year using a jammer on the city’s buses. When people would start blathering into their mobiles (“I’m on the bus!”) he’d turn on the jammer. He told a reporter: “A lot of people are extremely loud, no sense of just privacy or anything. When it becomes a bother that’s when I screw on the antenna and flip the switch.”

My hero.