We all dread standing or sitting next to an idiot - or collection of idiots - at a concert or theatre performance. But some audience members take idiocy to another level.

Police were called last week to what has been described as a 'mini riot' during a performance of stage musical The Bodyguard in Manchester, where some people refused to stop singing along loudly to the closing number, I Will Always Love You.

The song, made famous by Whitney Houston in the film version, has been belted out to mixed results by countless talent show contestants over the years. Others sing it so badly they considerately choose not to do so on prime time television or in the company of others.

But there's no escape in the confines of a theatre and it must have been a nightmare being near those trying to bellow over the stage performers.

Certain people at live shows seem to think it's fine for their own extravagant enjoyment of the event to ruin it for others. Whether it's holding a mobile phone aloft in front of you for two hours solid, trying to conduct a shouted conversation into a friend's ear or a doggedly insisting on wearing a tall hat, we all have horror stories.

I once saw a fight at the most unlikely of live shows, as one middle-aged man objected violently to another's attempts to sing along to Bryan Ferry's incendiary ballad Slave to Love. Security dealt with the incident and police weren't called but I've still seen better behaviour at gigs by The Pogues.

If you ever see Vanessa Feltz at a stage performance, probably best give her a wide berth. Discussing the Manchester incident on TV's This Morning, she asked: “Isn’t the whole point of going to a musical that you sing along to all the bits you know and when you don’t know the words, you just make them up?”

Yes, we've all been next to those people. At least their lyrical improvisations have a perverse entertainment value which makes them somehow less annoying than someone who knows every vocal inflection and belts it out with a demented purposefulness.

The best people to sit near are those who have been dragged along and sit there with bored indifference, rather than trying to spark a riot with their intrusive vocal stylings.