OUTSIDE BROADCAST
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THE GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL
THE GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL IS BACK IN 2022 IN ALL ITS CROWDED GLORY. FOR THE BBC, IT WAS IMPORTANT AFTER SUCH A HIATUS THAT ITS 2022 COVERAGE SHOULD BE BIGGER AND BETTER THAN EVER BEFORE - ADDING UHD, A DEDICATED IPLAYER CHANNEL AND AN EARLIER KICK OFF TOO
2019 was the last time the BBC covered The Glastonbury Festival in all its glory with 2020 completely cancelled due to Covid and 2021 a crowd-less affair. For 2022, the BBC coverage “will
be bigger in scale and range than ever before,” says BBC Director of Music, Lorna Clarke, who commissions for BBC Glastonbury across TV and radio. Along with performances on BBC1, 2, 3 and 4, iPlayer will have a dedicated Glastonbury channel and will broadcast sets from the Pyramid Stage in UHD for the first time. For Alison Howe, the BBC’s exec
producer of its Glastonbury coverage, it’s been a process of getting back into the saddle after a two-year hiatus. “We’re relearning and we’re all remembering,” she says. There’s a lot to catch up on “so it’s a bit like learning to ride your bike again.”
FRESH IDEAS But, she says, while the BBC’s team has got back into the swing of things,
“we’re equally not just doing what we did before.” That comes from a combination of wanting to “come back and offer even more to the audience in terms of their experience of watching, listening and interacting with Glastonbury” along with the fact that “ways of working have changed over the last couple of years.” Howe says the planning for the
2022 coverage “bizarrely started in 2020. Because many of the artists have been held over since the proposed 2020 event.” Production meetings had already been held with Paul McCartney’s team for that one, for instance. But for the 2022 planning proper,
from September last year “within my little team at BBC Studios, myself, our line producer, and our technical manager, we started to have some very initial chats between ourselves about things we might want to do differently,” says Howe. However, Glastonbury is not the BBC’s event so “you can only plan so
far, because so much of what we do is built around what the festival does. You have to wait for the festival to be ready and then you can really go for it.”
CLEAR AS DAY What is planned is filming The Pyramid Stage in UHD and HDR for the first time. “We actually had a plan to film the Pyramid Stage in UHD in 2020,” says Howe, although that was obviously curtailed. A test UHD shoot was done in 2019 in a limited way. “We had a couple of cameras set up to show the festival and the BBC what it might look like. It was a very simple test. It was a fixed camera shot mostly filmed during the day and it was only seen in one of the OB trucks on a monitor. It was very simple, but it was really interesting and exciting.” Howe says it’s “one of those things
that had to wait, but it really feels that now more than ever, it’s a good time to do it.” Howe is hopeful about how UHD will show “the detail on stage, but also, we’re really hopeful that
Summer 2022
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