Anne Goode (l) leads an 'anti-Glastonbury' service in 1997
Credit: Karen Davies
Twenty-nine years ago, two Bristol-based documentary makers were casting around for their next project. Steve Poole and Bernard Hall had heard whispers about tension between residents in the small Somerset village of Pilton and Michael Eavis, the local farmer who ran the freewheeling Glastonbury Festival on fields adjoining the village. They decided to gently investigate.
The duo started regularly driving down to Pilton, 25 miles away, where they’d chat to locals in The Crown pub and visit Eavis at his home on Worthy Farm. On an early recce, they noticed that someone had erected a 30-foot white cross in their garden overlooking the festival site. The filmmakers had stumbled across a very English culture clash: the quiet and conservative village with strong Christian values versus the Methodist farmer with the vast Pagan music jamboree at which, two years previously, New Age Travellers had rioted, set cars alight and caused £50,000 of damage. Channel 4 commissioned a series.