Around the time I started going to music festivals in the late ’90s, there was a disturbing tendency for bored camera operators, in between acts, to pan the crowd for young women perched on people’s shoulders, and linger on them until they exposed their breasts.

Some of the women appeared to do this willingly, with a certain zest for the occasion. Others seemed less willing but eventually relented, on the basis that flashing the crowd was the only way to get the camera off them. A few refused outright – and were roundly booed by the 25,000+ perverts with whom they were sharing the experience.

With the advantage of hindsight, this is clearly reprehensible. The sort of thing I’d struggle to even explain – let alone justify – to a young person today.

Which brings us to the ‘kiss cam’, an invention that (believe it or not) I was largely unfamiliar with until a tech CEO was caught having an affair and forced to resign after kiss cam footage at a Coldplay concert went viral on social media.

There are so many problematic concepts in that sentence. “Kiss cam”. “Viral on social media”. “Coldplay concert”.

But it’s the kiss cam that most offends my moral sensibilities.

What a grotesque invention. It should be banned immediately. Laura tells me it’s been a prominent part of the US basketball scene for decades. Basketball should also be banned.

The primary purpose of attending a concert is to watch the band, not the audience. And while I personally have no wish to see Chris Martin perform any Coldplay songs written in the past 20 years, once he starts spending the performance commentating on random members of the crowd, he really is wasting everyone’s time.

Regardless of where you land morally on the subject of affairs, the reality is that we are paying punters going to see a show. Our presence might help make the show, but we are not the show, and it seems reasonable to expect that our anonymity might be relatively well protected in a stadium of 60,000+ Coldplay enthusiasts.

This is a hill that I’m more than happy to die on. My fear is that there are now plenty of people who’d be perfectly content to dispense with the performance altogether and spend 90 minutes watching the kiss cam.

And that’s why it must be immediately eliminated from the live entertainment industry, along with onstage marriage proposals, and arseholes who spend the entire show with their backs to the performance, ‘conducting’ the crowd. They should be banned – and possibly shot.

Photo by Alex Lian on Unsplash