Here is a suggestion from your valued customers.

The Phoenix should be a food-free cinema!

We are members (and frequent customers of) and generally enjoy the Phoenix cinema.

Two recent excellent films – Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy and Jane Eyre – have no backing music and rely on silences to build atmosphere, to enrapture the audience.

But the film directors have overlooked the neurotic munching, drinking and grazing habits of today’s audiences.

Recently, at the 6.30pm performance of Jane Eyre, every rat-like scrabble into wrapped foods, every crunch of crisps, every greasy-handed forage into popcorn and every slurp of life-shortening beverages, distracted the whole audience.

They shushed the culprits – who in turn whispered and giggled and crunched cellophane and cardboard like infants at a birthday party, throughout the whole film.

It was awful. It was similar but not quite so bad the previous week during Tinker Tailor but nevertheless, the certain knowledge that fast-food and fizzy drinks are generating uncontainable volumes of smelly methane gas in dozens of incontinent bellies equipped with exit valves spoils the cinematic experience.

Does the cinema licence permit it to issue strong plastic bags with draw-strings, to silence members of the audience – to terminally hood the noisy ones and contain the noxious gases, until they quietly expire?

If not; we suggest it ban food, drink and happy chatting and increase the ticket price to compensate it for the profit margins on the food and drink sales.

This would be a far better business model for it – and if advertised widely, would attract many more serious cinema goers at the higher price.

The Phoenix should be a food-free cinema.

NOEL HODSON, Brookside, Oxford