Woe, woe, woe, woe....Portaloo

The Deluded Herd were trying convene another Homage to Nuremburg this morning. This time they used their special privileges to ‘do a Glastonbury’ down at the godawful Bay Festival (see http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=45882 for more).
Under normal circumstances they wouldn’t need a tent. A festival Portaloo would have done the job nicely and had just the hot, sweaty atmosphere evangelicals seem to like.
But was there more to this than meets the eye?
Last year’s original Bay Festival set new local precedents for the over-pricing of tickets to see sad burn-outs, inconveniencing of locals and, in return, mass disinterest. It was no surprise that the organisers irritated Peel residents and local politicians so much that nobody wanted them back –ever – or that the commercial set-up behind it eventually went bankrupt.
How or why our national misgovernors ever fell for the whole charade all over again and lent an even bigger venue in the capital - Nobles Park - to the ‘new’ festival management we’ll never know. It certainly couldn’t have been a brown envelope job, as most island retailers are having nothing to do with a ‘business’ which probably still hasn’t paid last year’s bills, never mind wanting a credit line for this year.
The ticket prices are just as outrageous – with an average family needing to spend in the region of £100 to see the Sunday afternoon X Factor runners up meet Britain’s Got Talent runners up extravaganza which features the only artists anyone under 40 has heard of. So how handy that godbothers, presumably, could stroll in free on Sunday morning then ‘forget’ to go home again, and I’m sure nobody from the churches would have thought of that – them being such paragons of virtue and all.
Or it might be even simpler than that.
This year’s festival has been played up like nothing is wrong (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Bay-Festival-fever-hits-as.6369304.jp ), though that’s probably more to do with the advertising clout of the ‘sponsors’, but it’s noticeable that yesterday what should have been a crowd-filler (the Diversity show) eventually offered free entry to kids with every adult ticket in order to make the place look even half-full. And this ‘looking full’ is the key because (as the unsuccessful organiser of a previous festival once told me) the money is in the webcams, not punters on the ground.
Maybe the simple truth is that even the Sunday afternoon show isn’t shifting units, so the organisers are happy to have a few hundred godbotherers waving their hands about and looking blissed on camera – kind of like crowd extras in a Hollywood blockbuster who you don’t even have to pay, and who don’t even need to act because they’re naturally enthusiastic about total rubbish anyway.
Yup, reckon that’ll be it. Though that won’t be the way either godbotherers, tourist department or festival organisers will spin it in coming weeks.