Festivals Britannia, BBC Four

A startling one in 10 British adults apparently went to a music festival this year. Given that I’m a music journalist and I didn’t, maybe I’m some kind of astronomically unlikely anomaly. I’d like to think so. But those familiar aerial shots of Glastonbury – not just a few fields but a sizeable expanse of Britain’s patchwork-quilt landscape, completely overrun by an infestation of teeming humanity - is enough to make me feel smugly sane to have decided, as usual, to just remain cosily at home watching whatever the BBC had decreed were the best bits.

But that doesn’t mean that a potted (and pot-steeped) history of these inexplicable mass gatherings of dreamers, drug addicts, drop-outs, anarchists - and presumably a few music lovers – wasn’t welcome. The secret of the music festival’s popularity was summed up by ancient hippy songwriter Donovan quite early in this 90-minute documentary: “When you arrive at the festival it’s as if your life has been cut from the life that you lived.” So perhaps this alternative experience has never appealed because I don’t live a life from which I feel the need to escape. Or is there a word for the fear of 100,000 human beings crushing in at you from all sides, imposing their loud, smelly, intoxicated selves upon you? Agoraphobia doesn’t seem to quite cover it.

But I’m quite happy to believe another thesis put forward here, that the last half-century of festivals were merely the latest manifestation of mankind’s need to gather in one place at certain times of the year (the longest and shortest days of the year, for example) to drink and be merry. The program took us back to the post-war jazz events of the 1950s which saw the birth of the teenager who, by definition, needed to mark out their own cultural landscape, right up to the present day which sees the now-contained (and therefore cordoned-off) health-and-safety-friendly festival as just another opportunity for large cooperation to sell crap to the hapless. This was in fact a documentary implicitly and explicitly about our society as much as it was about music festivals in particular.

Contributors from jazz musician Kenny Ball through to Roy Harper, Steve Hillage and Billy Bragg reminisced about their particular era, as did other frazzled festival veterans and organisers, and for a while I was almost beginning to believe I had been missing something. But then came the story of how, gradually, the authorities began to see these events as symbolic of a youth culture moving toward anarchy. For example, one punter recalled the infamous 1974 Windsor Great Park Festival which was invaded by hundreds of police officers. With a completely straight face he spoke of how revellers “formed percussion groups” to show "the pigs" that they weren’t going to be intimidated. I’ve no doubt that the police were more than happy to join in these spontaneous jams with that familiar tattoo of truncheons on skulls.

But levity aside, by the late 1970s new forms of music were being generated by new drugs (or was it the other way around?) as speed-fuelled punks replaced acid-tranquillised hippies and the attitude became fuck everything and everyone rather than love everything and everyone. And needless to say, the police upped the ante too, culminating in the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985 when the Wiltshire police laid into a bunch of New Age travellers with unprecedented aggression, preventing them from setting up the annual Stonehenge Festival.

This always watchable film was as much a social/psychological history of one in 10 Britons as it was a musical one, in the way it asked the question: why do we feel the need to gather together with hundreds of thousands of strangers to become intoxicated beyond reason while watching bands that are too far away to even see properly? The answer was a multilayered one, but as Billy Bragg pointed out, “The music festival is a rite of passage for us all now: how old are your kids going to be before you let them go to a festival on their own?” But the last word should go to Glastonbury’s founder, Michael Eavis. Countless counterculture experts have tried to get to the bottom of why the hippies of the golden age of the festival didn’t fulfil their ideological destiny. Eavis put it like this: “They really believed they were going to change the world. But they were pretty stoned though, that’s the thing.” Indeed.

• Find books and DVDs on music festivals on Amazon
• Watch Festivals Britannia on BBC iPlayer
• See theartsdesk's UK Festivals 2010 Round-up
• See theartsdesk's European Festivals 2010 Round-up