Right sorry people, but its RANT TIME. This evening I was all set for an apparently pleasant trip to my local Vue cinema, to see the latest Simon Pegg / Nick Frost combo, World’s End. Just to reiterate, that was a VUE cinema, remember the brand people… After the standard 20-30 minutes of trailers and adverts, the film started. But something was amiss. Was the popcorn a little too sweet? No, just right, maybe my seat wasn’t entirely comfy? Again no, sorted there. So, what was the matter? Well… Yours truly generally has to take advantage of audio description headsets when visiting the cinema. For those uninitiated audio description is a service whereby an audio commentary is provided to a film, describing the action that takes place onscreen that wouldn’t be apparent to a visually impaired person, sort f like a football commentary, but along the lines of “The man enters the room, gun in hand…” Or “Isla Fisher takes her kit off…” (I wish). And as always the audio description headsets had been provided for this showing. But, there was no commentary, no sound coming through, nothing telling me what was happening or going on. Basically, I might have well been sat in a broom cupboard. As such, I had to leave the film 20 minutes in, with nothing to sort the situation out. Now, I realise that to many this may seem trivial. Some would say “Shit happens…”, but that’s not the point. Imagine if the screen had suddenly gone blank at the beginning of the film, what would have happened? Would it just have been a matter of “Well, we’ll refund you, and here’s a couple of extra free tickets (though you’ll have to pay for refreshments yourself) (oh, and yeah, we obviously can’t guarantee that the audio description will work next time0. Or would they have actually tried to sort it? I suspect the latter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking for the film to have been stopped, just for someone to look at the headphones and find a solution as opposed to shrugging their shoulders and looking at me in an “Oh well…” type way. A little empathy, a little comprehension that this is the 21st century and as such things like this shouldn’t happen. Vue (I’ll repeat to shame them some more VUE CINEMAS, the STRATFORD WESTFIELD branch if anyone’s interested) are a big company, they have multiplexes across the country, I should be able to expect more from them, and a better standard of service. NOBODY Should be made to feel like a second class citizen by a company of this size for ANY reason, let alone on account of their disability. The worst thing of all, the apology, when it FINALLY came, was last knockings, after we’d agreed to piss off elsewhere and been dealt with. This should have been the VERY FIRST WORDS UTTERED. Not an afterthought following 10 minutes of a branch manager trying to work out how his own companies audio description headsets worked before coming back with “Well it works in every other screen, I don’t understand it…” Basically Vue (yes, that’s VUE CINEMAS, spelt V U E), screw you and the horse you rode in on. I won’t accept anybody making me feel the way that you have tonight, an inconvenience, a problem to be dealt with, and a box ticked. You can take your overpriced popcorn, tickets and headphones and shove them where the sun doesn’t shine (though the headphones won’t tell me whether the suns shining there or not). One day you’ll realise that tonight you’ve made an indignant, arsey enemy.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 01:10:19 +0000