Glastonbury 2025 showed the BBC at its brilliant best and cowardly worst

Irish Times

11 hours ago

In books about screenwriting, much is made of the ticking clock, the hoary device by which an audience is moved to suspense by the knowledge that time is running out.
The standard example is the bomb primed to go off in exactly three minutes, but it could also be a school dance one week away, or a terminal diagnosis giving our protagonist six months to live.
Series four of
The Bear
(Disney+) dispenses with all such subtlety when the titular restaurant has a nonfigurative clock installed in its kitchen, ticking down the seconds until it runs out of money and must close its doors for good. 'I know writers who use subtext,' the great screenwriter Garth Marenghi once said, 'and they're all cowards.'
The restaurant
finds itself on a precipice the show itself might recognise: can it push past slightly dwindling buzz to achieve the excellence it needs to sustain its legacy? For the restaurant this means a Michelin star. For the show, slightly less lukewarm reviews than those that greeted its somewhat patchy third series. Our chefs have 1,440 hours to find out. We viewers must content ourselves with about 6½.
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And, for the most part, this fourth series delivers exactly what its most ardent fans crave: dozens of closely written arguments made up entirely of shouts and mumbles that tumble together like breaking waves; attractive, dysfunctional people being variably competent at extremely difficult tasks, whether that be haute cuisine or learning to express themselves with stoically uttered therapyspeak; seemingly hours of footage in which
Jeremy Allen White
says sorry while pursing his lips in the manner of someone hoping to blow a whistle through a straw; whole-episode detours into the private lives of single characters, replete with long, painterly sequences of them looking anguished at laptops while exquisitely chosen songs play out in full; and big-name cameos from actors you'd presume are too famous to star in a show that's mainly about loud, charismatic people screaming as pots and pans clank to the ground.
To limit The Bear's appeal to these elements is, obviously, reductive. For all that its patter and clatter have become a little formulaic, listing everything it does a lot – perhaps even too much – is still listing everything it does better than pretty much anything else on television. I greatly enjoy its fussy little melodramas, even if I do find the stress and precision of its kitchen plots more interesting than (at least two, entirely separate) ancillary storylines in which minor characters work as estate agents. Sure, it's a formula, but it's one that works on me. It's good eating, and focusing on The Bear's tropes, tics and ticking clocks risks distracting us from one of the best dramas currently available.
Elsewhere, it's tempting to say that people were distracted from the BBC's
Glastonbury 2025
coverage by the furore surrounding
Kneecap
and
Bob Vylan
. It's primarily tempting because this is factually inarguable, but choosing to frame the uproar as a distraction is to miss the core point of what took place on
Worthy Farm
last weekend, and the curious contortions into which Britain's national broadcaster continues to pretzel itself.
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Glastonbury Festival says chants about Israel Defense Forces by Bob Vylan 'crossed the line'
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Across multiple channels, and all over its dedicated online portals, the BBC maintained its annual experiment of making Glastonbury the most comprehensively documented arts festival on the planet. And its coverage is, we should acknowledge, a wonder. On radio and TV combined, 125 hours of programming dedicated to acts large and small, alongside an exquisitely produced, curated and constantly updated archive of material free to watch at any time for viewers in the UK via its iPlayer.
This was simply extraordinary arts broadcasting, with umpteen highlights, from
Alanis Morissette
's triumphant, emotional Pyramid Stage debut, and the winsome, soulful pining of late-life
Neil Young
, to the main-stage supremacy of the pop ingenue
Olivia Rodrigo
welcoming
Robert Smith
for two Cure bangers.
For me, nothing beat the propulsive, infectious glee of Meath's own megastar,
CMAT
, clearly on the path to her globe-conquering peak.
Glastonbury 2025 was, in short, the BBC doing what it does best: free-to-air arts coverage of such dazzling quality and breadth that you'd be forgiven for thinking even the most sour-faced scold at the Daily Mail would have a hard time attacking it. Wrong, of course, but forgiven, nonetheless.
For all of you living under a rock very far from the nearest healing field, it was on Saturday afternoon that those scolds' opportunity came.
First Bob Vylan, the rap-punk duo, took to the West Holts stage to decry Israeli genocide in
Gaza
, and led the crowd in incendiary chants of '
Death to the IDF
' that were aired live during the BBC's coverage. This was immediately followed by Kneecap's performance on the same stage, which the BBC had pre-emptively confirmed it would not be showing live – leading one enterprising broadcasting start-up,
Helen from Wales
(TikTok), to livestream the show direct from the crowd, peaking at 1.7 million viewers.
Kneecap! Live at Glastonbury Festival, West Holts, Saturday, June 28. Filmed in one go, no editing..
And then came the fallout. The BBC was roundly criticised for airing Bob Vylan's set (and, in fairness, for censoring Kneecap's appearance). There was swift condemnation from politicians and pundits alike that either had been booked at all, and Avon and Somerset Police announced it was
launching a criminal investigation
into comments made from the stage during both performances.
By Monday the BBC itself had released a statement describing remarks made as 'incitement to violence'. Many were quick to point out that inciting violence against a literal army, not least one almost 4,000km away, perhaps stretches the definition of that term, and that the BBC explicitly rejected calls for a similar apology in 2020, when a panellist on Have I Got News for You suggested
dropping a bomb
on Glastonbury to kill
Jeremy Corbyn
supporters.
No matter. Between then and Wednesday morning, my TV viewing included half a dozen BBC News bulletins, every one of which gave the outrage over the chants higher billing than the 200 Palestinian civilians killed in those intervening 48 hours, half of them while seeking food at designated aid sites, across several attacks that also targeted a school, as well as a cafe
crowded with women and children
and
hosting a birthday party
at the time. If moved to discuss distractions, we should really start and end there.
It would have been nice to use the BBC's mostly excellent coverage to reminisce about my one trip to Glastonbury, in 2015, during which I watched Christy Moore watch Kanye West, and managed to avoid passing a solid bowel movement for four straight days; to wax lyrical about music festivals, or the joy I now feel watching them – for free, excellently rendered and produced in full high definition – from my couch rather than while covered with mud, sunburn or both in a series of increasingly large fields I've paid £400 to sweat in.
But the main story of the BBC's Glastonbury 2025 coverage will now, and forever, be this self-made morass of missed points and moral cowardice. To focus solely on the music, and the BBC's superlative presentation of it, would overshoot complacency and enter the realm of complicity.
'Apart from all that unpleasantness,' we might ask, 'how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln?'
'CMAT was excellent,' even she may well have been moved to admit.