“What makes me so proud to be part of the coverage is a very, very small minority of people actually get to go to Glastonbury,” says the BBC presenter Jamz Supernova. “It brings it into your homes, whether you have a desire to go one day or you never want to.”
The 6 Music DJ, also known as Jamilla Walters, is part of a small team of broadcasters bringing this year’s Glastonbury festival into the homes of people across the UK on television, radio and online.
She will be presenting on radio, iPlayer and TV channels with other big broadcasting names including Dermot O’Leary, Greg James, Jo Whiley, Lauren Laverne, Nick Grimshaw and Zoe Ball.
BBC iPlayer will offer more than 90 hours of performances with live streams of the five main stages: Pyramid, Other, West Holts, Woodsies and the Park. The Pyramid stage sets will be available to stream live in ultra-high definition and in British Sign Language.
“I used to watch Glastonbury on the TV,” says Jamz. “I remember being like 19 and watching artists like Janelle Monáe performing, but it wasn’t as interactive. With the iPlayer it’s all happening live and you’re able to almost build your own festival from the performances. There is something for everyone.”
The dizzying scale of the task of broadcasting the festival falls to a team at BBC Studios, the broadcaster’s commercial subsidiary, lead by the executive producer Alison Howe. The operation will feature more than 90 artists across more than 90 hours of coverage, using 58 cameras and 50km of fibre cable, and is months in the making.
“The performances alone, that’s a bit of a task – a brilliant and beautiful task, I may add,” says Howe. “Some artists want to work quite intimately with their performance and how we capture it. Others are very happy to just let us get on with it, because we have a good rep there for making all artists look and sound good on the BBC.
“Then there’s the amount of hours across all the TV, curated and presented coverage, and then all the live streams. So when I sit and think about that, I feel sick.”
Jonathan Rothery, the BBC’s head of pop music TV, works with Howe in effect as commissioning editor for Glastonbury festival to shape the offering. He is still in awe at the scale of the challenge. “I remember having a moment there a couple of years ago,” he says, “after a very busy day … just looking at all of the cablework running across the site – I’m not a technical person so it blew my mind.”
This year the producers face a headache over the inclusion on the lineup of Kneecap, a trio of Irish republicans who have been accused of making statements on stage in support of Hamas and Hezbollah, an allegation they have strongly denied. One of the group, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, has been charged under terrorism laws and is currently on bail.
There has been political pressure – including from the prime minister – on festival organisers to drop the band and on the BBC not to broadcast their performance.
Asked about the issue, Rothery says: “Our plan is to bring as many of the sets to our audience as we possibly can but obviously we have editorial guidelines, and we need to make sure that any artist on the stage, regardless of who they are, fits within our guidelines and is appropriate for the audience. We have those conversations and make those decisions all the way up to the festival and over the weekend.”
Howe and Rothery work closely with festival organisers, including Emily Eavis, months in advance and are privy to the lineup before its general release. With the overwhelming choice on offer, Rothery says, the television and radio package manages to navigate any clashes. “That’s why the live stage streams are super useful. So if you want to curate your own Glastonbury, you can fill your boots.”
Howe and her team work closely with the artists to make sure the live performances are represented well on television. “We offer to talk through meetings on – site. At festivals, no one gets a sound check, so a lot is at stake,” she says, en route to a run-through with the Friday night Pyramid stage headliners, the 1975.
Jamz Supernova’s hot tips for the weekend include Alanis Morissette on the Pyramid stage, Ezra Collective on the Other stage, Yussef Dayes and Doechii on the West Holts stage and Anohni and the Johnsons on the Park stage.
She holds great respect for the scale of the undertaking, having experienced Glastonbury as a performing DJ and as a reveller and now seeing it from the other side: “All these people, all these nuts and bolts, come together to make it happen. I was so amazed at seeing it through sober eyes. Now I feel like I’m part of the army bringing it, it’s like my mission.”