It’s that time of year again, when thousands of superannuated ‘hippies’ (ho-ho) head for the Glastonbury Festival and the BBC despatches a mighty proportion of its staff to follow them there.

I have never understood why the Beeb thinks it acceptable to devote its resources to plugging an event so blatantly commercial as to have this year netted those arch-bread-heads, the Rolling Stones. Sarah Vine noted in The Times that there is to be 250 hours of coverage on BBC1, BBC2, BBC Three, BBC Four and Radios 1, 1Xtra, 2 and 6Music. “What must it be it costing the licence payer?” she asked. Sarah’s husband (Cabinet minister Michael Gove) might make it his business to find out.

It seemed to me an indication of what a jolly junket ‘Glasto’ has become for the BBC that I should have heard Chris Evans complaining a few days back about the non-inclusion in the media ranks of his breakfast show’s resident sports man, Vassos Alexander. I rather suspect that this omission might have been rectified by now.