The BBC’s Glastonbury coverage is in jeopardy ...Middle East

“Holy f***ing s***, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people in my life!” Those were the words of 22-year-old American pop singer Olivia Rodrigo as she headlined Glastonbury’s Sunday night. But the thousands of people – in varying states of disrepair after several sun-drenched, booze-fuelled days in the fields of Somerset – were nothing compared to the audiences watching along at home on BBC One. Yet as the lights went down on the Pyramid stage, and the last stragglers staggered towards the train station, there was a feeling that 2025 might mark the end of Glastonbury as a televisual experience.

There are significant murmurings, within New Broadcasting House, that the current, lavish broadcast of the festival has had its day. For weeks, the discourse centred around the Irish rap trio Kneecap, who had been referred to the police over comments made about Palestine and political violence (Mo Chara is currently on bail for terrorism charges).

Before they had even taken to the stage, the BBC made the decision not to live broadcast their performance (it was, instead, livestreamed on TikTok by a Welsh lady who amassed over 1m viewers), anticipating some fiery rhetoric that never arrived. But for all the attention that was lavished on Kneecap in the build-up to this year’s Worthy Farm shindig, it was a less-heralded punk duo from Ipswich who caused the most drama.

square GLASTONBURY

'I'm a free man!': Kneecap drew in the masses for an incendiary Glastonbury set

Bob Vylan made themselves a household name on Saturday as they led a chant of “death, death to the IDF”, referencing the Israel Defence Forces, who are currently engaged in a series of bitter conflicts. The backlash was instantaneous. The festival organisers said they were “appalled” by the comments, and politicians – including Keir Starmer, Health Secretary Wes Streeting, and shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp – rushed to condemn the band. A BBC statement today said that “with hindsight we should have pulled the stream during the performance”.

And that’s the crux of the issue. The existence of incendiary political rhetoric at Glastonbury is not surprising. This is, after all, a music festival with a long history of political activism. In the 1980s, proceeds were donated to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, with anti-Thatcher activists running the show. In more recent years, the festival has given prominent podiums to left wing firebrands like Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn.

But TV has changed things. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the BBC partnered with the festival to bring live music to living rooms across the UK. And it was another 15 years before the festival began to stream on iPlayer, a move that has resulted in the near-simultaneous broadcast of most acts at the festival. It has unlocked live music for a population who wouldn’t dare brave the raucous atmosphere on founder Michael Eavis’s dairy farm. But it has exposed the BBC to its least favourite commodity: risk.

Live television comes with a degree of uncertainty. It is a peril well known to news channels and sports broadcasters, who have had to battle with technical gaffes, political incursion, and the odd naked streaker over the decades. These factors are usually exogenous, though there have been instances of interviewees derailing a conversation to make provocative political proclamations, or even athletes utilising the glare of the cameras to make social points.

The BBC will now be faced with the temptation to cut or reduce their Glastonbury content. They might do it under the cover of cost-saving, a plan that has already decimated their live exhibition of events like the Olympics. But the belief that the BBC’s impartiality straitjacket must, necessarily, apply to Glastonbury is misguided. The corporation, after all, broadcasts all the major political party conferences, and gives its audience the credit of being able to ascertain what is a personal statement, and what is the opinion of the BBC. And though of course Bob Vylan’s onstage chants went beyond party politics, few who tuned into the Bob Vylan livestream will have mistaken the comments for anything other than a punk act going rogue.

There are many people who will never experience Glastonbury, not because they don’t love live music or can’t face the ticket queues. It is an expensive and profoundly inaccessible experience. But for those who are struggling for money, have mobility issues, or just fancy seeing how Rod Stewart is looking at 80, the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage is a marvel. Compared to Coachella or Primavera, it is peerless – and yet, like with so much of what the Beeb does best, it is threatened by reactionary politics and tabloid columnists.

The BBC, the Culture Secretary and the festival organisers should all have the courage to stand up and say, in no uncertain terms, that the festival cannot be defined by the uncensored words of a couple of private citizens playing a side stage. When the festival returns in 2027, after a fallow year, it must do so with renewed commitment to its broadcasting bravura and not with an enforced timidity.

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