They’re the latest column-inch fashion, a hilarious formula that our favourite national newspapers have chanced upon in a bid to fill the empty pages between the relentless roadside bombing in Helmand at the front and the demoralized football commentary towards the back.  Take a cynical, slightly neurotic dullard whose idea of paradise is watching How Clean is Your House? repeats on More4, casually sipping a cup of Earl Grey.  Wheel them out of their comfort zone; replace Kim and Aggie’s onscreen OCD with some generic breakthrough indie act, ruin the tea leaves in favour for a two litre bottle of what may or may not be warm cider and before you can say I should’ve packed my wellington boots, you’ve got yourself an article.   

 The ‘Festival Virgin’ story is one of staggering ignorance, usually followed by a great deal of um-ing and ah-ing before concluding that whilst all festival goers are in fact twats, the columnist can at least leave with a semi-understanding of why some people might find the experience attractive.  One of the most entertaining, and indeed popular Festival Virgin accounts goes to Charlie Brooker, a towering satirical reactionary against all forms of authoritative technology and the perpetual irony to which mankind is inevitably doomed.  Imagine Eeyore, only a 39-year-old pessimist living in the 21^st Century and not a stuffed donkey.

 Brooker’s article “Oh good, it’s raining again” in which he recalls his first festival experience at Glastonbury 2007, is a triumph in column writing. The imagery he conjures up is humourous and brutal, describing the site as what would happen if the cast of Emmerdale were hurriedly forced to “construct Las Vegas at gunpoint  in the rain”.  He berates the “post-pubescent gitsacks” loudly spouting bullshit at 4 O’clock in the morning, a group of people we can all largely identify with, and what’s more he finds himself having the time of his life by the last day.

 While Brooker’s article was by no means the first festival convert piece written for a newspaper, it did set the bar for a new standard.  So much so in fact, three summers later and these accounts aren’t quite so funny anymore.  The novelty has faded, people don’t care if you’ve never been to a festival, or the psychologically repressed reasons why this may be the case.  Journalists aren’t venturing out into the unknown on a voyage of self-discovery, worth a few laughs to readers on a Monday morning. Their adventures are far more clinical, compulsively assessing the reasons why thousands of people choose to roll around in mud naked, wearing nothing but a traffic cone to cover their shame each year.  Where once we had the gonzo philosophy of Hunter S., the get-out-there-and-do-it-and-exaggerate-whilst-you’re-at-it mentality, we now have the theoretical analysis of an amateur Louis Theroux, peering cautiously from behind a guy rope.

 Take Sathnam Sanghera for example, who recently wrote an article for The Times on this year’s Isle of Wight Festival.  He faced the usual irksome problems: poor sanitation, walking, queuing, missing a guest appearance by Kanye West, and he even pulled the Las Vegas metaphor out of the hat for good measure.  It was when Sanghera began noting the disproportionate attendance of white, middle class students to ethnic minorities that the column became needlessly stretched for original material.  His humourous attempt to explain this, that immigrants have come to the UK in order to escape the third world conditions recreated in British festivals, is a joke that only succeeds in causing discomfort, a strong indication that black humour is definitely not Sanghera’s forte.  Our journalist on the frontline concludes that getting pissed is the only way to endure a festival, which begs the question, if he turned to liquor on the Isle of Wight, what would happen if you airdropped him in on a traditional Sunday evening at Reading Festival?

 Now there’s an article I’d like to see.   

Tom Goulding