How a quarter of a million ravers changed the country
The year 2002 seems like a lifetime ago in Jak Hutchcraft’s excellent film about the last of the big free parties in Britain. Fatboy Slim’s Big Beach Boutique II was a shoreside dance party where the organisers expected about 50,000 people. That estimate was “not right,” says a policeman looking back.
It was very not right. More than a quarter of a million ravers descended on Brighton Beach to see the man who was at the time the world’s biggest DJ play some bangers. The story of the day was a simple one – 250,000, as the aerial cameras make abundantly clear, was far too many people. It could have been a disaster, but it wasn’t, because everyone behaved surprisingly well.
A disaster that might have been is a better outcome for humanity than a disaster that was, but it’s not as good a subject for a documentary film. Right Here, Right Now (Sky Documentaries, Saturday) sits in the same debauchumentary section as the two Fyre festival films from 2019 (Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened and Hulu’s Fyre Fraud) and Netflix’s Woodstock ’99, but because things never descend in to proper seventh-circle-of-hell raft of the medusa-dom, it’s not as shocking.
A lot of rubbish was left on Brighton Beach, it stank of urine for ages and the
authorities learned vital lessons about the importance of infrastructure assessments for future mass events. There would be no more free, unticketed parties in the UK. But basically, everything was okay. As such, Right Here, Right Now is a Titanic story devoid of an iceberg.
Whether it’s a story worthy of a feature-length film is therefore open to question. There is a sense that the film-makers are backfilling their allotted run-time with some historical ballast, including a chronicle of Brighton, a timeline of UK rave culture, the rise of Big Beat and the story of Norman Cook’s, aka Fatboy Slim, unlikely ascent from floppyhaired indie kid to superstar DJ.
To me that’s the kind of story I could watch on repeat, wearing my old Technics T-shirt with the Leftfield album on in the background, a can of Hooch in one hand and an airhorn in the other. But I imagine that to older, younger, wiser and just about anyone who wonders what all the fuss was about, it would just seem like padding.
Still, in an age where fun means £200 tickets to micro-managed events with corporate sponsors and about as much atmosphere as a knitwear convention, the site of 250,000 having it large on the beach is awe-inspiring. Not everyone is in it for the money.
In the era of hugely tedious podcast hegemony, the surprise about Amol Rajan’s excellent series of extended interviews is that they’re even filmed at all. But in the case of Amol Rajan Interviews: Bill Gates (BBC Two, Friday), an hour spent with surely one of the world’s most interesting men, I’m glad that it was.
Gates ambled into the room to be greeted by Rajan shouting, “Heyyyy! It’s Bill Gates,” a bit like this was MTV. Gates was visibly confused and Rajan continued to catch him off guard, with Gates’s facial grammar becoming consistently entertaining. There was the look to the left, presumably to some Gates Foundation comms team wonk, that said, “I was not briefed for this guy and you are fired”; there was the furrowed brow that said, “Why does he keep asking me about how much I like cheeseburgers when we’re in Kenya to talk about hunger and disease?”; and there was the half-smile of grown-up answerability that said, “I’m not some petty billionaire despot like Elon Musk so it’s fine – FINE – for you to keep asking me questions about how well I once knew Jeffrey Epstein.”
Gates seemed to divide events into things that he predicted would happen and things that have taken him “by surprise.” Admittedly, he has predicted a lot of things, such as the importance of the micro-computer and the devastation of a viral pandemic.
I don’t think he had predicted that Rajan would be quite so pugnacious, windmilling in with questions about Gates’s childhood therapy, Qanon quackery and Gates’s role in the catastrophic side of technological innovation (“My generation didn’t take care of the downside of digital media”).
All in all it showed why the one-onone interview, from Emily Maitlis and Prince Andrew to Frost and Nixon, has endured. Everyone has a plan until they come up against a brave interlocutor, well-researched and wielding the simple sword of asking powerful people questions they don’t want to be asked. The camera merely allows us to watch them squirm.
Right Here, Right Now ★★★★
Amol Rajan Interviews ★★★★