There are literally hundreds of music festivals being held in the UK nowadays, and some of them – traditionally Glastonbury, T In The Park, Reading and Leeds and V – are given hours of live coverage on television, along with extensive highlights packages. Even some of the growing ’boutique’ festivals, such as Latitude and The Big Chill are getting coverage too. And yet, apparently, our esteemed schedulers can only find three hours to broadcast programmes about the world’s largest arts festival in Edinburgh. Surely I can’t be the only one who thinks this is a travesty?
The Fringe gets most of the column inches these days, but in fact there are lots of festivals going on during the Scottish summer. There’s (deep breath) the official Edinburgh Festival, the Book Festival, the Jazz and Blues Festival, the Art Festival, the TV Festival, and the Mela as well as the Fringe, all of which take place between June and the end of August. You’d think, with all of that, that television might take a slight interest. Over 1.5 million tickets were sold for the Fringe alone, for goodness sake! But no, apart from three programmes produced by Culture Show team, there’s zilch.
Now I understand that you can’t necessarily do blanket live coverage of, say, comedy gigs like you can music festivals – comedians don’t always like the world and his wife to know their punchlines from seeing them on telly. But there are ways of getting round it – Sky Arts, for example, had a couple of short shows everyday during the Hay On Wye Literary Festival, featuring interviews with authors and speakers, and little readings too. I see no reason why this format could not be adopted or adapted for the Edinburgh festivals – there’s plenty of material there for producers to get their teeth into, so why won’t they bite?
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