Picture this: You’re sitting in screen 15 in some faceless warehouse of a multiplex cinema, waiting for the main feature to start.

You’ve shelled out the best part of ten quid for your ticket (more if you incurred the “online booking charge” that attends internet pre-purchase) and most of those around you have spent the same again on industrial-sized vats of overpriced popcorn and syrupy soft drinks, which they are now slurping and crunching noisily.

Adding to this cacophony is the drone of mobile phones that has not diminished even though the lights have dimmed, signalling the start of the performance.

Despite studying the seating plan in advance to select a position that would afford you both ample leg room and a clear line of sight, you’ve wound up in the wrong seat because there are no ushers to ensure that previous patrons proceeded to their allotted seats. So you’re now squished into an obscure corner of row F with the teenager behind you kicking your seat to the rhythm of their evertexting thumbs.

And then the movie starts…

The first thing you notice is that the top quarter of the picture is missing. Or maybe the image is upside-down, or back to front, or out of focus – whatever. You wait for the projectionist, whose job it is to ensure that the feature is properly presented, to notice and correct the error with a tiny turn of the lens or a deft tweak of the racking knob.

But despite the fact that there’s something very clearly wrong with this picture, nobody notices. Why? Because, in today’s multiplex, the projectionist – for a century the very life and soul of a thriving cinema – has become obsolete.

Where once a team of highly trained operators would nurse several reels of celluloid through the cogs and pulleys of a projector, now a management wonk with a mouse clicks “Go” on a computer and the movie is left to its own digital devices, like those robots in the sci-fi movie Westworld, about an automated amusement park in which nothing can go wrong, go wrong…

Although it’s commonplace for grumpy old gits like me to insist that everything was better when they were young, you’d have to be almost pathologically perky to believe that all is currently well in the world of the modern multiplex.

Over the past few years, there has been a growing tide of letters and emails from listeners to the Kermode and Mayo Film Review bemoaning the increasingly parlous state of film exhibition in the UK. From projectionists who have lost their jobs to punters who have lost the will to visit a cinema ever again, there is a sense in these impassioned missives that film-goers are losing patience with the shoddy treatment they receive in the cinematic equivalent of the supermarket.

Some are lucky enough to live near an “independent” cinema whose properly projected programming looks beyond the latest Hollywood blockbusters. But for many it’s the multiplex or nothing. No wonder so many film lovers are concluding that home viewing is increasingly preferable to the perils of public performance.

There is a solution, of course; demand better service. If you have a local arthouse cinema, then support it (if you don’t, you’ll miss it when it’s gone). As for the multiplexes, don’t just sit there and take it when the film is shown in the wrong ratio in an understaffed auditorium. Complain!

Better still, ask in advance how many projectionists and ushers will be attending the performance for which you are paying. If the answer is “none”, then ask where all your money is going. After all, a cinema that doesn’t have a projectionist, but does have a fast-food stand, is not really a cinema at all, is it?

What do you think? Post a comment below.

Mark Kermode’s The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex published by Random House Books, £11.99 is out now. For details of Mark’s book tour please visit www.markkermodebooks.co.uk