John Cleese has been complaining about the quality of sound in the cinema. And, in a way, I can see where he is coming from.

I, too, have had the same experience: you go into the cinema, you sit down, and you find you can't hear what people are saying. Or, at the very least, you can't hear every single word they're saying. These days, people mumble in films. And sometimes they speak in accents or dialects you can't quite make out. And sometimes you can't get every word because there's music in the background, or traffic noise, or explosions.

Now, this annoys Cleese a lot. "No older person goes any more," he complains. Part of the reason for the problem, he says, is that "your hearing starts to go in your early 30s, and it's hard to pick out the voices from the ambient sound."

Another problem is that "when they mix movies now, they forget the audiences have not heard the dialogue. They've all heard the dialogue hundreds of times and take it for granted."

So what's really going on here? Cleese is definitely right about not being able to hear what people are saying. But this is not just because of slackness on the part of sound engineers. It's a reflection of the status of words in our culture. When films were first made with sound, not much less than a century ago, words were a prized commodity. Looking at these films now, it sometimes seems as if the actors are over-pronouncing their dialogue. The words seem almost too clear, which makes the stories seem less real; they look more like plays than films.

The first film I had trouble with, dialogue-wise, was The Deer Hunter. Remember the long wedding sequence which takes up roughly the first third of the movie? You can't hear all the dialogue, can you? And the point is: this is deliberate - you're not supposed to hear everything. You're supposed to look, and listen, and glean what you can as if you were a guest at the wedding yourself.

Of course, this is part of a pattern. Some critics have said that, with the invention of the Steadicam, cinema moved from the drawing room to the street. And there were all sorts of repercussions - faces got more normal-looking, dialogue was sometimes fuzzy and background noise had to be accounted for. Films are getting less and less like plays every day.

So there you have it. Cleese is right. Dialogue is getting harder to hear. Movies sound less like Olivier's Henry V - and more like The Wire. Of course, now we have the technology to watch movies over and over again, not hearing everything the first time might be less of a problem. The point is that having blurred dialogue is often a deliberate policy on the part of the film-makers. I sympathise with Cleese. But, for good or ill, our movies reflect a new, more mumbling world.

Still, I can see a great opportunity here. Think of it - old-fashioned films with clear, crisp diction. Cleese's words suggest there would be a large audience for it.