Festivals, Sex, and Suspicious Parents is a Step Too Far

Festivals, Sex, and Suspicious Parents

Having largely ignored Sun, Sex, and Suspicious Parents I was rather intrigued by the prospect of its spin-off, the woefully titled Festivals, Sex, and Suspicious Parents. For the uninitiated, Sun, Sex… is a show where teenagers and young twenty-somethings are followed around by a camera crew on their sambucca-swilling shenanigans. Little do they know, their parents have also flown out with them and are watching the tapes at the end of each day to see what they’ve been getting up to.

 

I always found the prospect of the original show kind of douchey. It never really struck a chord with me because I’m not really the ‘lad holiday’ type. My position on the matter has changed somewhat with the new spin-off, which takes the same format and applies it to young people going to their first music festival. Now this did interest me because I enjoy music festivals, and I thought the concept was really harsh, not only because the kids should be allowed to enjoy themselves but because what they were doing wasn’t much worse than you would typically see at a Students’ Union on a Saturday night. With this in mind, it would be nice if the producers of the show would please just fuck off and leave our festivals alone.

Green Man festival

Don’t get me wrong, some of the behaviour on display was pretty appalling: one girl routinely decided to piss in public rather than queue for the toilets, and a bloke continued called women “sluts” for refusing his sexual advances. On the other hand, hang around in any city centre after midnight on this little island and I guarantee you’ll see much worse than this. I’m not trying to excuse their behaviour; I just worry that the music festival, which can be an amazing place that becomes your entire world for 3 or 4 days, is being demonised by this extremely voyeuristic bollocks.

 

Festivals are a place to disconnect from the real world: where all the stresses and worries of life melt away. But for the girl on this show, that’s been totally ruined because she can now be easily found on YouTube taking a piss in front of a load of people. The problem isn’t the cameras –  the BBC covers many festivals such as Glastonbury, and, yes, occasionally you’ll see some guy completely off his cake bouncing around to Cyndi Lauper by the Pyramid Stage. The problem is that this show’s sole aim is to make these people look stupid by focusing on their intake of alcohol, and their sexual exploits, both of which they’re presumed to be inexperienced about, and therefore reckless with.

Festivals, Sex, and Suspicious Parents

Another problem is the fact that their parents are privy to everything they do. These people are of an age where they’re going to want to have their own lives, separate from their parents. If they choose to get horrendously drunk and make a complete tit of themselves, that’s absolutely their right.

Also, I spoke earlier about festivals being an opportunity to disconnect from the world. As a young adult still living with your parents, they are part of what you want to disconnect from. The people featured in the show are getting to the point in their lives where they’ll want to fly the nest, and these little moments of independence can mean the world. It’s nothing to do with disliking their parents: it’s attempting to grow up.

Festivals, Sex, and Suspicious Parents

I suppose at the end of the day, the subjects of the show must have consented to a camera crew following them about (even if they weren’t told exactly why) so it’s kind of their own fault that they’ve ended up making a complete twat out of themselves on the BBC. Also, the fact that they’ve done this means that their parents would probably end up seeing it anyway, so I guess one of my main issues here is that this show is seriously fear-mongering.

I know parents are prone to worrying, which is completely understandable, but how are shows like this going to do anything but strike fear into the hearts of parents across the country? Is that the point? The view of parents who’ve never been to a festival probably goes something like this: a drunken, drugged up free-for-all with all the law enforcement capacity of gangland Mexico and where everyone’s boning one another. Whilst all of this may be true to an extent (apart from the Mexico metaphor, that was just silly) someone who’s never been to a festival doesn’t understand the genuine sense of community that goes on there. There’s a real sense of togetherness, an attitude of “fuck the rain, we’re all in this together.” People are genuinely friendly, and every single one of them has that one thing in common: the music. At any festival it’s easy to get chatting to people because you’re all there to see the same set of musicians, and think of how friendly you suddenly become with someone when you realise you share the same favourite band.

festival

Going back to Festivals, Sex…, one guy who realizes his friend is paralytically drunk puts her to bed and goes out to have his fun, then returns to check on her. Later on in the episode she ends up banging her head and getting concussed (she seriously had no luck that weekend), and he helps her to the medical tent. I think this shows that the guy isn’t the complete bell end the programme tries so hard to make us believe; he’s just absolutely steaming.

 

To conclude, if you’re a parent and you watched Festivals, Sex, and Suspicious Parents: Yes, your children will probably get very drunk and maybe have sex at that festival they’re going to. But no, you don’t need to worry, and you certainly don’t need to follow them around with a TV crew to scrutinise their behaviour. Just let them have their fun, yeah?

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