3 hours ago
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Name: Getting Coldplayed.
Age: The original incident happened on 16 July this year.
Appearance: Rumbled, sheepish and guilty.
Come on, we’re not still talking about those cheating execs captured on camera at a middle-of-the-road stadium rock gig? We’ve had our fun, they haven’t (both resigned and at least one is getting divorced). Time to move on. I would, but it’s happened again.
Surely they wouldn’t be foolish enough to get caught on screen again? No, someone else did: American football fan Jeff Comeaux. His facial expressions were so entertaining at a recent game between his team, the Tennessee Volunteers, and the Georgia Bulldogs that the Jumbotron operator kept filming him, and he went viral.
So far, so 2025. What’s the problem? Comeaux had called in sick to go to the game and his employer spotted him in a meme online.
That’s awkward. Very much so. “I got Coldplayed,” Comeaux said.
Did his team win at least? No.
Oh dear. Still, I like how “Coldplayed” is a verb now! Have there been other Coldplayings?
There was another incident involving a fan caught kissing his companion (who turned out not to be his girlfriend) at a football game in Ecuador 2020, then jumping away from her shamefacedly when he saw himself on the big screen; he later pleaded for his partner to take him back. Something similar seemed to happen at a Houston Astros baseball game in 2021 – a man with his arm around a woman spotted they were on camera and immediately sidled away looking awfully guilty, to the internet’s delight.
Hmm, this is a bit depressing, as if we’re extracting bleak crumbs of entertainment from human folly and unhappiness. Chill out, Tolstoy. Would some funny Coldplay Jumbotron Incident parodies help? There are whole reels of them on YouTube now. Some even feature giant fluffy mascots!
No. Does nothing nice happen on big screens? Yes, sometimes there are marriage proposals! Only last month, a man proposed on screen during a US Open tennis match; when the woman said yes after a tantalising wait, the whole place went wild.
Awww, sweet. That’s more like it. Although other such public proposals haven’t gone so well. In 2017, one captured on the big screen at a baseball game in Boston ended up with the couple fighting and, reportedly, the crowd chanting: “She said no.”.
I’m starting to think the moral of the story is that it might not be a good idea to let unpredictable, intimate moments from your personal life appear on a vast screen in front of tens of thousands of spectators? That seems sensible advice. Especially for Coldplay fans: the band have 138 more shows planned for their tour and the Jumbotron is here to stay: “We are going to keep doing it,” Chris Martin has said.
Do say: “In the future, everyone will be caught on the Jumbotron for 15 seconds.”
Don’t say: “Don’t hate the Coldplayer, hate the Coldgame.”
