Book festivals are brilliant, even on Zoom

The “Whitsun” Bank Holiday means that the Hay Festival is underway – for the thirty-fourth time. For a second year running, Covid means a virtual event with sessions broadcasting for free online, available afterwards on “Hay Player”.

Hay is one of the big players of book festivals, along with Edinburgh and Cheltenham. They should be applauded for their ability to adapt and thrive even when deprived of what seemed to be their unique selling point: in-person contact between authors and audience.

The mushrooming of smaller festivals to the point that there are now hundreds of events across the country each year is more remarkable still, in an age when we are told that print is dead as live-action screens take over. 

I have been lucky enough to take part in numerous sessions from Oxford to Lewes to the Alhambra and especially at Hay, which Sky sponsored for some years and Cheltenham, backed by The Sunday Times. At every stop, I’ve been amazed by the passion and interest of the paying customers, who regularly turn out in droves to pack out damp and chilly temporary marquees. 

Until now, I had assumed that the big attraction was the live event and perhaps the chance to breathe the same air as an admired writer. The success of the temporary moves online debunks that. There seems to be a genuine hunger to participate in civilised discourse by any means. The rule at the sessions is to generate light rather than heat – unlike TV interviewing. Even when festival speakers disagree, they are unlikely to savage each other. 

The only time I have experienced the exception to this polite behaviour was when I found myself accidentally as the sole representative of international news organisations in Granada, facing the ire of Andalusians re-discovering their Moorish history.

Festivals don’t always run smoothly. The organisers who plan the events aren’t impresarios. My background in producing television has often proved beneficial. When I met Andrew Davies, the TV adaptor known for finding sex in the classics, I asked him what he wanted to do in our session. “I’ve cued up these tapes, and I’m going to play clips,” he replied. Not until the tech team had hurriedly installed a video player on stage, he wasn’t.  

The late Gore Vidal was a star booking at one big tent event, which could have been a disaster. Luckily, I had interviewed him for television a few weeks before and had found out that Old Acid Tongue was on his last legs. I was able to nurse him through the hour bowling softballs, mostly questions provoking the answer; “You stupid boy”. 

The first rule of chairing a festival session, and – in my opinion – interviewing on TV, is that it is not about you. The task is to extract and illuminate the opinions of “guests”. This can sometimes be a problem for other panellists in a shared session. I was due to chair a sold-out session discussing green gardening with Monty Don and Greenpeace. But with days to go, Don announced that he was stepping down from Gardener’s World for health reasons (only temporarily, as it turned out). 

For the festival-goers, it was as if he had died. Hand-tied floral tributes and sympathy notes were dropped off for him at the reception desk. Worse, many assumed he wasn’t coming to speak and cancelled their tickets. We were downgraded to a smaller auditorium. Monty turned up on time, but his co-panellist was utterly oblivious to the fuss about his colleague. He was bemused when I explained that the only way we’d ever get around to serious matters was to let Lazarus Don open the session by walking on stage alone. Don was reluctant to do so but was duly greeted with an extended standing ovation.

Solo entry was a trick I learnt from Al Gore at the Edinburgh Television Festival. I asked him how he wanted to start – coming on after my introduction? taking our seats together? “I’ll go on first alone,” he replied, “I’ll get more applause that way”. Gore, then in his Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth pomp, was a true festival pro. In the few minutes spare, after he got off an overnight red-eye flight, he demanded; “tell me three things about Edinburgh, three things about the audience, three things they want to hear and three things they don’t.” We did our best to fill him in, and he duly laced our thoughts on the Enlightenment and TV executives around a couple of his off-the-peg lectures. He leavened it all with, “I used to be the next President of the United States” jokes at his own expense. Self-deprecation always goes down well. Another standing ovation bagged.

Some session chairs fall in love with themselves and hog their guests. My rule is that a minimum third of a session should be taken up with questions from the audience. It’s a risk because hands can be slow in going up. It is best to have an extra question up your sleeve to break the ice or even to find someone in the audience who you can pick on to get the ball rolling. I blundered at a Foyle’s Luncheon by asking for questions, unaware that was not the done thing at these decorous events. 

Fortunately, the late Sir Robin Day, the grand inquisitor, was one of the guests, and I persuaded him to sing for his lunch. I was not invited back, but 88-year-old Christina Foyle, who had been indisposed, sent me a lovely hand-typed thank you note; sadly, she died a few days later.

Despite their vigour and popularity, book festivals are not big money earners – for the organisers or the participants. Most do not make a profit and depend heavily on volunteers. It costs a lot to build the temporary tent cities in which they take place and transport panellists to relatively remote provincial locations. The standard for most authors is a token appearance fee and the promise of a signing session in the bookshop. This can be a lonely experience, especially if a more popular writer is at the next-door table. As a condition to take part, best-selling authors now have the clout to demand guaranteed sales of thousands of copies. 

Big newspapers and television companies are under pressure themselves from digital platforms and are increasingly reluctant to splash the cash sponsoring book festivals – which can be seen as a kind of competition to mainstream media. TV channels have largely abandoned book programmes. 

Festivals have been forced back to their grassroots to survive. For example, the Welsh government is a major supporter of Hay, leading to some locals campaigning for it to concentrate more on Welsh literature. 

Streaming is a threat to traditional media companies, but it is proving to be a lifeline for comparatively low-cost activities such as festivals. They may not attract mass audiences, but there are still plenty of people who want the authentic, intimate and low key experience of listening to writers, in person.