How did the BBC manage to get Glastonbury so wrong this year? - Jayne Dowle

The organisers, the Eavis family, who own the Somerset site, have long promoted a peaceful event, where everyone can find their place. Those at home, meanwhile, enjoy the performances on TV and radio, without enduring over-priced street food and questionable lavatories.

I’ve been once, pre-children and have watched from the sofa pretty much every year since. I’ve brought my kids up with it; we’ve held ‘Glasto parties’ with makeshift tents and ‘mocktails’ in the living room. These days it’s a cheese board, but still, it should be festive, an education, an inspiration, not an endurance test.

At one point on Friday evening, three BBC channels were showing Glastonbury and there was iPlayer too. Yet it was extremely frustrating to find the act you wanted; I searched in vain for Glaswegian rockers The Fratellis, only to eventually discover that there were no cameras planned for the Avalon Stage, where they were performing.

But that was just me being demanding, my daughter said, as she sighed and wrested the TV control from my grasp.

Apparently, the BBC sent 400 or so staff down to Somerset. I cannot imagine what they were all doing. My children’s late father, a sound engineer who regularly worked at Glastonbury and other major festivals, would have been mortified.

Before we even consider the decision to show, live, for 20 minutes, an aggressively political performance inciting murder, the BBC’s coverage was by turns patchy and over-blown, with questionable ‘curating’, over-long and often pointless interviews with performers, a series of technical hitches and other big acts, such as Leeds’ Kaiser Chiefs, not even shown.

Inexplicably, Kaiser Chiefs were left off the BBC’s livestream, which had gushily promised to bring the festival direct to the legions of music fans stuck at home.

The band, beloved for hits such as Ruby and I Predict a Riot, were hardly tucked away in a tiny tent, taking to the main Pyramid Stage on Saturday at mid-day for an hour’s set. They have since apologised to fans for the omission.

Our music industry, already beleaguered by Covid shutdowns and Brexit, which has made touring extremely challenging, deserves far better.

Still, it’s never a tea party. Glastonbury always has its political moments. Just ask veteran left-winger Billy Bragg, who last appeared in 2022.

But a lot can happen in three years; there’s a horrible irony to Bob Vylan’s hate speech, at a music festival, reminding us of the hundreds killed, raped and kidnapped at another music festival, on October 7, 2023. Music brings us together? Not this year.

We now live in extremely seditious times, and even before 2025’s Glastonbury kicked off the Prime Minister himself had got involved in a row over the Irish rap outfit, Kneecap, accused of, amongst other things, inciting violence against MPs.

Deeming Kneecap not “appropriate” - band member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, known as Mo Chara, was charged with a terror offence for holding a Hezbollah flag at a London gig last November – Starmer weighed in and the BBC, which has broadcast the music extravaganza for almost three decades, took the decision not to show the act live on TV.

Meanwhile, someone clearly didn’t get the memo about Bob Vylan. A quick bit of due diligence into this polarising pro-Palestine punk rock duo would have revealed that something was likely to kick off.

Yet, the BBC, bound by strict rules on political neutrality, blithely went ahead. In the name of what? Free speech? Self-expression? Dare we say, ‘tolerance’? Whatever political side you take personally, a broadcaster has to exercise judgement. A warning to viewers that Bob Vylan’s performance would be confrontational and controversial didn’t quite cover it.

Clearly an error of judgment was made in allowing the livestream to continue; within minutes it was obvious Bob Vylan was only here to incite hatred, leading a vicious chant to kill members of the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces).

The BBC, funded by us, the licence fee payers, should hang its head in shame over the coverage of what should be a jewel in any broadcaster’s crown.