Down with the TLF!

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve nothing against tall people. Some of my best friends are tall. Some of my close relatives! I don’t judge people simply on the length of their trousers.

It’s just that I object when tallness gets in the way of the rights of normal people to enjoy the things that tall people take for granted.

Like an unrestricted view of a theatre stage or cinema screen.

I usually get to a theatre in good time and invariably sit down before the seats in front have been filled. In some theatres there is a really good incline, so it doesn’t matter who comes. But normally there is a 10- to 15-minute period of awful unknowing while you wait to see who is potentially going to ruin your evening.

Take last Friday for example. The Sadler’s Wells theatre, London. C and I take our seats, which are in the stalls, fairly central, some 6 rows from the back, when the auditorium doors open. We comment on the theatre, which neither of us has visited before. We peruse the programme. We wait. And then we trade glances and moan internally as a large gentleman sits down in front of C. I consider offering to swap seats with her but then a blond of Amazonian proportions takes the seat in front of me. S***!

Her head obscures 40% of the stage. If I don’t move my head to peer around the obstruction I can see some 20% of the left hand side and 40% of the right hand side of the stage. The result is that, as the performance proceeds I am constantly bobbing my head this way and that to see what on earth is going on.

I haven’t looked to see who is behind me, but it is not implausible that this has a knock-on effect with the next person in line having to bob the other way and so on, creating a linear head-dance every bit as poetic as what's happening on stage.

I think if Pina Bausch, rest her soul, wants me to see 13 drenched dancers thrashing and splashing about to a high-energy up-beat electronic soundtrack than that’s what I should be seeing. Not some weird split-screen version. Especially when I’ve paid £60 for the privilege.

The answer? One solution might be to segregate the tall people to one side of the auditorium, much in the way that smokers were asked to go to the right of the cinema back in the ‘70s (not that that worked). Or special performances for anyone over 5’ 9. These measures could be voluntary, but with fixed penalties for anyone who obscures the view of someone behind: the price of admission would be adequate, paid directly to the person or people inconvenienced.  I’m not advovating compulsory height-reduction surgery, except for persistent offenders anyway. 

Or you could have those height restrictions you get on the rides at theme parks: anyone above 5' 9 not admitted, or guided to specially lowered seats. I'd even grant them more leg room. Venues could be encouraged to adopt segregated seating with grants and tax breaks. 

The seats for talls would, of course, be more expensive since they use more space, so soon there would be direct action orchestrated by the Talls Liberation Front, clashes with police outside segregated cinemas, torching of theatres, and before long the outlawed Provisional TLF would find someone tall who was depressed enough to be willing to charge into a queue of normals and blow themselves up.

Perhaps I'll just buy an inflatable cushion.