Singapore audiences bad? There are worse ones

I read with interest your article about audiences behaving badly in Singapore.

I am a Singaporean who has been living in Shanghai for a long time. Compared to the audiences in China, Singaporean audiences are of a gold standard.

More than half the time when I watch a movie at the cinema in the city, these disturbances occur:

Children playing near the screen while the movie is showing. Their parents just cannot be bothered to stop them. Other cinemagoers also do nothing to shush the kids;

Cinema staff switch off the air-conditioning to save electricity. I then locate the switch by the entrance and turn it on.

Chinese people do not mind stuffy rooms, as air-conditioning became widespread in China only a decade ago;

Once, in a high-end cinema, a patron was smoking in the back row;

Body odour or smelly feet, which prompts me to change seats;

Instant messaging or talking softly on smartphones is so common, it will be weird if no one does this during a show.

Rudy Chen

This article was first published on December 6, 2014.
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