Sarah Sands: Take it from an usherette: kissing's what the back row is for

Those of us in the film world take seriously our responsibility for the moral health of the nation. As an usherette at the Swiss Cottage Odeon, I used to shine my torch with Stasi severity at the shadows of the back row.

Dressed in my company uniform of violent purple nylon suit, lilac shirt and florid scarf, I oversaw approximately 50 showings of Yanks, starring Richard Gere in his prime, and, despite the screen message about oversexed and over here, the back row responded to my beam of light with the probity of the synagogue.

Since this was the era of Mickey Rourke's celebrated comic scene in Diner, it was hard for a boy to slip so much as an arm across the seat without ironic explosions from neighbours.

So it seems an odd time for Odeon cinemas to decide to install CCTV at pilot cinemas for the "safety and security of audience members". Much better direct health and safety officials to Max Mosley. Except that he, unlike the rest of us on a night out, is entitled to privacy.

These days the young are reportedly having sex on every street corner, in the back of party limos and, later, on hospital trolleys. Cinemas, for several decades the epicentre of adolescent sexual activity, now seem to be attended by people who like watching films.

They were used for other purposes, of course, when the parental home was out of bounds. But we are all liberals now. Besides, if children are economically home-bound until their fifties, you might as well install a double bed for the long haul.

Which is where people increasingly prefer to watch films anyway. Societal separatists, such as Jeremy Clarkson, have written of their loathing of the communal cinematic experience.

Even those of us who argue that the Bourne Experience needs a packed auditorium, or that Sex and the City doesn't make sense as a girls' night in, find the nauseous Coke cartons and nightmarish portions of popcorn an unlovely experience. To have a camera trained on you as you bang past people's knees, worsens the atmosphere of corporate indifference.

We also know that statism multiplies offences. The Odeon may protest that it is looking for breaches of the peace, but it will lead to 11-year-old girls being marched out for bringing their own Revels and boys for putting their feet up on the seats in front. Intervention is too great a temptation to license it.

And if there are any young romantics planning a first date at the cinema, then the cameras will surely thwart their love. Winston Smith's romance with Julia in 1984 failed to survive the cameras. They betrayed each other and submitted to the state. The extraordinary rise of the security camera in modern Britain is depressing, but when it threatens love affairs it is Stalinist. Did the Odeon learn nothing from The Lives of Others?

There are laws to cover indecorous behaviour. We do not have to go searching for it. The solution is for the Odeon to hand over their footage to film buffs, as a form of cinéma vérité. Film schools could pore over the genres, comparing the neurotic, highly vocalised sexual behaviour of the back row of the Curzon with the slapstick, boozy exhibitionism of, say, the Odeon.

The cinema back row is an innocent, comic institution and we cannot see it fall. The British are slow to anger but when roused, an usherette's torch will deal with the problem nicely.

Sarah Sands is editor in chief of British 'Reader's Digest'