Lowering the tone: how the eruption of mobile ringtones can be awkward, hilarious or get you on the wrong side of a celeb

Michael Gove made a schoolboy error when he left his phone on in a meeting. Phoebe Luckhurst enters the ring of fire
Lords of the Ring: James McAvoy, Michael Gove, Kevin Spacey and Hugh Jackman (Picture: Gareth Cattermole/Larry French/Oli Scarff/Ilya S. Savenok/Getty)
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The eruption of a mobile ringtone can — depending on the circumstances — be excruciating. And a Cabinet meeting is one such circumstance, as a humiliated Michael Gove discovered on Tuesday. Just as the Chancellor delivered the news of a fall in inflation, Gove’s phone (which he was supposed to have surrendered at the door for security reasons) mewled loudly. One witness describes the tune as “Jazz-FM-style comedown music after a heavy night out”; another pitched it as a “female ballad”. Reportedly, Gove won’t name his song as it’s an “in-joke” (though the PM definitely wasn’t laughing); a former special adviser told the Standard that Gove’s LOLz must be new, as he didn’t have a ringtone when he worked for him.

The Chief Whip might take (limited) solace in the fact that Cameron has also got a phone beef with Nick Robinson; the BBC’s political editor misplaced his mobile — containing the PM’s number, and those of most of the Cabinet — at a Manchester United match last year. But more comforting still is the fact that Robinson has also had a ringtone meltdown: last January, appearing alongside Tory MP Shailesh Vara, on the BBC’s Daily Politics Show, her defence of bankers’ bonuses was interrupted by Nick Robinson’s iPad playing Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls. Indignity and a shared aggressor might forge an unlikely alliance between whip and journalist.

Fat Bottomed Girls is an unexpected choice for the strait-laced BBC politico; on the other hand Dom Joly (of Trigger Happy TV) plays delightfully to type. A thirtysomething west London editor recalls the time she was in an off-licence in Notting Hill where Joly was also shopping for merlot — his mobile phone went off to the dance of the old-school Nokia ringtone, and like a man stuck in the nightmare of his own parody, he had to go outside to answer it (“HELLO?”). Everyone in the shop was prostrate with hysterics.

Actors — a notably light-hearted clan — aren’t laughing. Last year, during the opening night of his one-man show Clarence Darrow at the Old Vic, truculent US actor Kevin Spacey crossed the Fourth Wall to admonish an audience member whose phone was ringing, bellowing, “If you don’t answer that, I will!”

When Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig were acting in A Steady Rain on Broadway — when an audience member’s phone interrupted the drama, and Jackman urged: “Don’t be embarrassed, just grab the phone!” The video (which, aptly, someone filmed on a mobile phone from inside the theatre) went viral, scoring more than 35,000 views on YouTube. And during a run of Macbeth at Trafalgar Studios, James McAvoy threatened to take the bloodshed off-stage when he spotted an audience member recording him using his mobile. Last year, comedian Michael McIntyre walked off-stage at a sold-out show in Darlington after a female member of the audience reportedly wouldn’t stop using her phone.

Seems you should hold the phone if you want to stay on the right side of those with influence.

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