Chris Martin.
Photograph: Bob
Rose
Dave Simpson has got the best view of the festival: from his sofa.
On the second day at a festival, things traditionally go a little hazy around the edges, and so it proves on BBC2. Today the producers have got it together to provide little captions which tell you which songs bands are playing, so armies of New Order obsessives will be emailing bootlegging factories in caves in Peru about an exclusive new Orderly track called Crafty. You and I, of course, having paid at least some kind of attention to the Top 10 in recent weeks, will know the tune as Krafty. The BBC are having that kind of day.
God knows how much licence payers' spondulicks have been lavished on sending Mark Radcliffe miles above the festival in a helicopter, but the Mancunian seems bewildered. "I promised Kaiser Chiefs I'd watch them," he says, "I didn't mean from a mile above the ground." Down below, Leeds' Chiefs liven up an uneven second day of broadcasting by wrestling with an inflatable dinosaur. As you do, at Glastonbury.
Otherwise, the TV emphasises a growing gap between punters and performers. If they are covered in mud and looking like something from a foreign war report, they are in the audience. If they are wearing black and/or a suit, you are on stage. There are a lot of what comedian Phill Jupitus calls "the pristine bands" (such as Futureheads, Interpol). "Whoever's landed the ironing contract backstage must be minted."
If bands all look the same they also sound eerily similar. Athlete sound like Coldplay. Coldplay doing Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head sound like New Order. Perhaps this is why the Beeb has spared no remaining expenses to bring us horn-playing Spaniards called Amparanoia (like Fawlty's Manuel, they're "from Barcelona"); small children banging drums in a field called the Sound Sculpture, and the absurdly brilliant Hayseed Dixie's haystack romp through Motorhead's Ace of Spades. Otherwise, if the TV is turned on, Coldplay are on it.
Their year-long set (including repeats) sparks arguments on the sofa over whether they're effortlessly transcendent or endlessly boring. The cameras highlight Chris Martin's curious habit of dry humping the piano and as the set reaches a climax he vaults the entire thing. However much money they're paying, this is probably not the safest moment to land the job of doing Coldplay's ironing.
