Cultural Imperialism

It's that time of year again, when hordes of people descend on Glastonbury for the semi-annual mudfest. This also means that we have to endure those bloody insulting TV trails for the BBC's coverage of the festival. You know the ones I mean - they feature local people, mainly middle class and middle aged going on about how the music all sounds the same from a distance, etc. Basically implying that anyone who dares offer the opinion that much modern music is shit must be an un-hip old fuddy duddy. However, the most offensive of these trails is the one they show most frequently - the one with the bloke with the thick Somerset accent going on about how "I went in back o'car" once as the result of seeing a young woman festival goer "she were topless". If this guy was being used as a representative of any group other than rural farm workers, the BBC would be accused of racial stereotyping. They seem to have gone out of their way to find the most inbred-looking yokel, with the thickest accent the could find, brandishing a glass of cider as he remonstrates about "you shouldn't do that alongside a main road". The clear subtext here is that those of us who live outside of Britain's sophisticated urban areas - principally London - are just a bunch of degenerate carrot crunchers who just can't appreciate the bohemian culture of the metropolis. Hell, we haven't even seen a topless woman before (outside page three of The Sun, obviously)! But don't worry, those nice people at the BBC are bringing us their culture in the form of Glastonbury.

There can be only one response to this: "Fuck off you pretentious ponces!" If your idea of 'culture' is spending several days wallowing in mud, shitting in holes and listening to a load of dance music, with a smattering of has-been rock 'legends', you can keep it! As for topless women, out here in the provinces, we've had fully naked women dancing around huge wicker penises, in which we burn virginal big city intruders as part of our fertility rites, for centuries now! Don't bloody come down here in your Chelsea tractors patronising us! If we're really lucky, maybe a bunch of zombie druids on their way back from the midsummer festivities at Stonehenge will descend on the Glastonbury revellers, tearing them limb from limb for no obvious reason, much in the manner of the Blind Dead Templars in those 1970s Spanish horror films. Even better, perhaps a horde of crazed local 'yokels' - foaming at the mouth after being fed rabies-infected pies by hippie festival goers as 'a joke' - will invade the festival site and pitchfork them all to death. There's the basis for a great low-budget British horror flick there. Having said that, they'd inevitably balls it up by assigning some middle class ponce as director. Anyway, getting back to the point - isn't it about time they canned those trails? I know the BBC would claim that they are merely 'ironic', but that really isn't a defence for what amounts to very offensive regional stereotyping, not to mention cultural imperialism by the middle class London media elite. Fuck off you bastards, before I set my bull on you.