Wasted at the Festival

AS A man in his 50s who doesn’t camp out at music festivals and is left unamused by drug-induced comas and bestiality, to name but two of the subjects considered fair game here, I am not the target demographic for this film by the makers of The Inbetweeners.

So I took along my 25-year-old daughter, who is a great fan of music festivals and, by chance, had just come back from one.

I thought this might be right up her street — yet she thought it as relentlessly unfunny as I did.

‘It’s a film for gangs of 15-yearold boys,’ she said as we left. And not very discerning ones at that.

Put it this way: Carry On Camping, in 1969, covered similar ground with much greater comic sophistication. The story follows Nick (Joe Thomas, from The Inbetweeners), who has just been publicly dumped by his girlfriend, Caitlin (Hannah Tointon, also from The Inbetweeners).

Can three days at a festival in the company of his best friend, big daft Shane (Hammed Animashaun), restore his self-worth and perhaps also get him a tattoo on his backside, a nipple ring and a drug-fuelled sex session in the back of a car with a woman dressed as a Smurf? I’ll let you guess.

Noel Fielding has a cameo as a DJ called Hammerhead and Nick Frost as a tattoo artist, while Jemaine Clement, from the infinitely funnier and cleverer Flight Of The Conchords, is Shane’s mother’s boyfriend. They’re all sorely wasted.