Several readers have written recently with the same complaint. They have all forked out sizeable sums for tickets to live events – operas, Proms, rock festivals, whatever. And as ticket-holders they naturally felt entitled to expect the performers’ efforts to be directed primarily towards them.

But when they arrived, they found themselves treated more like extras on a film set. The event was being broadcast on TV or radio, or filmed for cinema transmission, or recorded for an album. And what became disconcertingly and discourteously apparent was that the production was geared far more towards perfecting the visual and aural experience for this larger, unseen audience than towards entertaining the punters at the live event.

I can relate to that. Some important Proms at the Albert Hall this summer were undeniably hijacked by BBC TV. The starting times were altered to fit telly schedules, and the gaps between items annoyingly protracted to allow TV presenters to interview someone, or each other. Most worryingly, I sometimes had the distinct impression that soloists (singers in particular) were performing for the microphone, and not bothering to project sufficiently into the Albert Hall’s vast spaces.

A similar feeling crept over me at the first night of the Royal Opera’s season – a performance of Don Giovanni that was also “simulcast” to cinemas across Britain and the Continent. Inside Covent Garden several of the star performers seemed unusually subdued in voice and gesture. Yet a correspondent who saw the simulcast at a cinema in Exeter tells me that, on the screen, their performances came across with mesmerising force.

The discrepancy isn’t hard to explain. A tiny facial twitch, or the subtlest vocal inflection, can have a big impact if captured in close-up by camera and microphone. But it would be lost on those sitting in the balcony of a theatre.

I think we are facing a bit of a crisis here. Technology won’t go away. On the contrary, there will be more and more pressure on promoters to disseminate live shows to as big an audience as possible. For commercial promoters, the imperative is the bottom line: selling the TV rights can multiply the scale of the fees they can offer to performers.

But for those in the subsidised arts world the impetus is no less strong, though here it is political in nature. Since these organisations are receiving large handouts from taxpayers, it seems only fair that as big a public as possible should see their work.

I accept all this. The trouble is that the acting, singing and staging techniques required for the camera and the microphone are very different from those needed in a large theatre or concert hall or arena. And if the former is given priority over the latter, the integrity of the live performance can be eroded or even destroyed.

That would be tragic. People who buy tickets for live events will soon get fed up with being treated like an invited “studio audience” for a television sitcom. They will stay away, and live performance will die. And if that happens, the very art-form is jeopardised. It’s a crisis that isn’t going to melt away. Anyone out there got a solution?

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