A Summer of Festivals Online - on the BBC mostly!

Back in Victorian times you would promenade daily, year-round down Park Lane and along Pall Mall until the summer ’Season’ hit, when you could take your showboating to a more extended range of venues.

Now in modern times, ’The Season’ as such is a more extended range of sporting, cultural, and most significantly - musical events. Back in the early days, you would need a tent, sleeping bag and boots, and a digestive system capable of enduring dodgy festival foods and long queues to portaloos. Nowadays, thanks to the BBC, you can catch much of the music festivals online - some acts in full, some in highlights fashion.

Watching music festivals online, also means you don’t have to gamble with choices like choosing between watching Eminem or Prodigy at the recent ’T in the Park’ festival.

If you have ever been to a festival, you will know that the audience experience of a live act can be very variable and depends on a huge degree on the vantage point you find yourself in. Many a times in my past I have found myself pushed to the fringes or having some obstacle in my path which affects the visual or auditory quality of the experience.

Again - no such problem online - the sound quality is very respectable, and the viewpoint of the performing artist is always going to be better than what you see from row 77 in Glastonbury. There has been a recent trend in cinemas to host live broadcasts from a variety of cultural events, particularly Opera. Considering the prices you pay at the Opera House, and the viewpoint / accoustics etc, the Cinema option is preferable or at least more practical - to many opera fans.

The added benefit of viewing online is all the related content and references, so you can quickly cross-reference the setlist with album tracklisting to pick out a favourite tune.

As with the BBC coverage of the World Cup, I am always impressed with how the BBC covers a live event. For all the festival sites out there, perhaps the BBC is missing the live interactive location map, but for pretty much everything else the festival experience is better on the BBC.

So far this year, I have followed:

Radio 1’s Big Weekend
Glastonbury
T in the Park

And we have several more up-and-coming, including:
BBC Proms
Reading & Leads

This is great value for the Licence Fee, and along with ’Doctor Who’ and ’Wonders of the Solar System’ this alone just about justifies the fee. I for one love and respect most of what the BBC does (apart from the new BBC News site of course, and apart from the recently changed Home Page) but that’s another story / blog ....