Did I unintentionally book the perfect seats for a Bond film?

22 Nov

My friend Archie had been looking forward to going to see the new Bond film when it was released. I booked a couple of tickets for the film at the Vue Cinema in Cardiff on a night we were both free. He’d asked me to book tickets towards the back and on the aisle. There were two tickets on the aisle, from what I could make out, in cheaper, £5 seats two rows behind the slightly dearer £6 seats.

However, once we got to our allocated seats, they were in fact quite near to the front, on the opposite side to where I thought I had booked. And the funny thing was, quite appropriately for James Bond, and which I had not noticed before, the seats were M15 and M16!

I wondered if something funny was going on, as I was certain these were not the seats I’d booked. Archie was really not especially keen on being quite so close to the front, although in fact, in my experience, being close to the front can be quite a good experience, particularly for action films.

A short time later, a group of students sat down next to us. To my immediate left was a young lady who in fact had the sophisticated demeanor of a Bond girl. While her friends went to get food and drink, we made brief small talk, establishing that in their case at least, they were definitely in the right seats.

Although the cinema was not packed out, and we possibly could have found two suitable seats further back, you were not supposed to switch seats, and Archie and I eventually decided to stay in the seats we were in, perhaps quite enjoying the idea of being in seats M15 and M16. It turned out to be quite an excellent film, and we weren’t so close as for this to be an overwhelmingly distracting factor.

Once the film finished, Archie went on to catch his bus, and I thought I would just enquire with regard to our seating position. I was told it was possible that I’d looked at the seating plan the wrong way round!

Once I got home, I looked up the Vue website and realised this was in fact what I’d done. Being used to booking tickets online for football matches, where the pitch side appears at the bottom of your phone’s screen, it hadn’t occurred to me that on the Vue website, the screen position would be at the top. But if I hadn’t made this mistake, we would never have been seated in seats M15 and M16…surely the perfect seats for a Bond film! And just who was the mysterious woman seated in M17? Perhaps I will never know.