If you’re going to the Glastonbury festival and you get there early, on the Wednesday or Thursday, there’s usually a smattering of entertainment dotted around the site that serves as a gentle warmup act for the main event. We Love Glastonbury is just that. It’s a preamble to the big weekend, whetting the appetites of both ticket-holders and telly-watchers with some of the most famous performances of the last couple of decades. It is interspersed with talking heads chatting about their favourite memories of the festival, whether they were there to see it or caught it from the comfort of their own living room via the BBC’s substantial and comprehensive annual coverage.
The programme is, it’s true, a bit slight, but there’s nothing wrong with that. It was always going to be impossible to condense more than 50 years of festivals into a single hour. This is mostly made up of the televised, BBC-affiliated last 25 years or so, although there is a brief clip of Oasis in 1994, when it would have been broadcast on Channel 4. The film also has to deal with the problem of other people’s memories of a really fantastic night out never being quite as interesting if you weren’t there with them. “The problem we’ve got is that there’s not much I can tell on camera,” says Self Esteem, sagely.
