Stephen Mangan at the Cambridge folk festival

There was something about the actor Stephen Mangan that had been bothering me since I saw Green Wing on television. Then when Episodes started on BBC Two, in which he appeared as a Hollywood screenwriter alongside Matt Le Blanc of Friends and Tamsin Greig of The Archers - and which I loved - it started to become seriously problematic.

You see, when I first watched him on TV I thought he was more famous than he was - kind of the opposite of that thing when you see someone from the telly in the street and start to say "hello" before you realise your mistake.

The suspicion crept up on me that we'd met.

There was this weird, fuzzy memory of an afternoon spent in Dublin in January 1995, where I was doing work experience. He was sitting, talking very fast in someone's flat - his own? - and was in the company of two other people, one of whom was on my newspaper course and is now a very well-known journalist. In fact, he's editor of The Times. I told you it was a weird memory. 

So when there was a sudden downpour on Sunday at the Cambridge folk festival and I retreated into a tent only to find that the he was in there too, the responsible course of action was to ask, even if it laid me open to the possibility of discovering that I was losing it...

"Yes, that was me," he said, looking quite surprised, before adding that it was nice to see me again, thus demonstrating that he has good manners, since I know perfectly well that if I hadn't seen him on television in the intervening 17 years I probably wouldn't remember him either...

However, it was such a relief to find that my mind hadn't been playing tricks on me that I had to go and sit down for a little while before returning to suggest that since it was clearly going to rain for a long time would it be OK if I interviewed him? And since he was well-mannered (and trapped) he agreed.

It turned out he was there because he made a documentary, along the lines of reclaiming a forgotten love, about playing with Richard Thompson for Sky Arts last year. The marginalised object of desire was folk music. This year the channel, which media sponsors the Cambridge folk festival, had invited him back to be interviewed. He was also doing a guitar workshop with Martin Simpson and babysitting Simpson's daughter, who seemed very sweet.

Mangan swore faithfully that he wouldn't say anything interesting to Sky, leaving the field clear for me.

"I don't know why I like folk music," he said, "because my wife doesn't like it and my friends don't like it and it makes me an outcast in my own circle. But I'm from County Mayo in Ireland and parties at our house involved carpets and rugs being pushed back.

"The process of discovering folk was a lucky one that started in the late 80s and early 90s with John Martyn and Nick Drake, then had me stumbling from one thing to another. I went to America for a year when I was 18 and someone gave me a list of things to listen to. I started with Richard Thompson.

"Then in my early 30s I got into the hard stuff: Nic Jones and Dick Gaughan. But there's this feeling that because I don't have that many mates who are into it I'm like Uri Gagarin, heading out into the void. I'm here to make some friends who like folk music."

He took a bit of a conversational detour enthusiastically to praise Fionn Regan's song Dogwood Blossom, from the soundtrack of This is England.

"For some reason it speaks to me: maybe because I have a strong melancholy streak. I like depressing music but I'm an optimist who also likes storytelling. My wife is the opposite - perhaps we complement each other in this respect. She's a pessimist who likes dance music.

"So for a long time in our house folk was a four letter word that I dare not utter. It was desperately uncool - maybe it still is, but I don't care. Eventually you have to face up to who you are and I'm a folky.

"But I'm a folky with two young children and I'm in a play at the moment that's on nearly every evening," - Birthday at the Royal Court, in which he plays a pregnant man - "so I don't get to see films, plays or gigs apart from the ones I'm actually in. When I was asked, I jumped at the chance to come here again. I love nothing better than to bring myself to the point of vomiting with nerves in the company of Richard Thompson." Not that he'd have to do that this time around...

But standing on stage is what he does for a living. Why would singing with Richard Thompson make him nervous?

"If we were doing Othello it would be fun. In fact, I think Richard should give us his Othello at some point. But there's something very exposing about singing. The music is dictating to you - the song is its own lyric. Whereas with acting you're in control.

"Singing is the most popular art form in the world but it's totally about emotion, so it's very revealing. You're expressing something about what it is to be a human being in a very pure way. Which makes it all the weirder that I'd choose to stand on a stage and sing one of the most famous songs ever written - Who Knows Where the Time Goes - while the audience nudges each other and remarks that I look the donkey out of Shrek.

"But it's good to do things every once in a while that make you want to shit yourself with fear."

Why? Most people go out of their way to avoid that.

"It makes you feel alive - it was an amazing thing. I stood there at the side of the stage and heard Richard Thompson do one of the best sets he'd ever done and then say at the end of it 'And here's Stephen Mangan'."

Despite being from County Mayo, Mangan has one of those Irish accents that doesn't really sound like an Irish accent. Dick Gaughan, on the other hand, has some fairly pungent left-wing views. I wondered whether he was comfortable with that?

"Yes, I'm quite a lefty. it's hard not to be when you're an actor because you're dealing with people. They're your bread and butter, so you have to try and understand them."

I'm pretty sure Adolph Hitler thought he understood people.

"Yes, but I don't think Adolph Hitler thought of people as people. As an actor you are mainly about people and community, and what makes people tick. I always viewed left-wing politics as having a compassion to it: I deal with the fact that kings and dustmen are all on a level, they're all human beings. For my purposes I can't look at them from a status point of view. And once you're looking at everyone in the same way you're coming from an egalitarian point of view."

A bit of probing finds that he doesn't like Mumford & Sons and when I asked about Bellowhead - whom I love - he changed the subject. "Show of Hands. They're good. I just had a tweet from the Shrewsbury festival asking whether I'd like to go along this year because Richard Thompson is going to be there, so maybe I'll get to meet them.

"After the last time, Richard invited me to sing with him again in a general kind of a way. So for a while I toyed with the idea of turning up every time he played and saying brightly 'I'm here to do my song'. Now I'm thinking of faking an emergency appendectomy so I can go to Shrewsbury. We're going to be on a family holiday in Wiltshire at the time, which isn't too far away."

So if you're at Shrewsbury and you see Stephen Mangan, be nice to him. He's there to make some folky friends.

* You can buy tickets to see him in Birthday at the Royal Court here.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed you could *like* its Facebook page. Or follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

British folk music gets its own satellite

Ladies and gentlemen, in the blue corner I give you Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Sky TV, among many other media outlets. And in the red corner we have Charles and Heather Denscombe, a pair of retired teachers who have built their own outside broadcast van and will be streaming the Shrewsbury folk festival over the internet to tens of thousands of people in more than 35 countries later on this summer - if last year was anything to go by - free at the point of use.

This is a story of old media versus new.

Before I elaborate, here's a picture of Britain's first folk music satellite.

OK. Not so much a picture as an artist's impression of Hylas 1, which is owned by Hughes and rents enough capacity to Mr and Mrs Denscombe all year round, via a company called Avanti, for an unlimited number of people to watch their webcast at any given time. And what the Denscombes use it for, 98 per cent of the time, is streaming high definition images of folk music from festivals. It's a folk music satellite.

This big thing had a small beginning. Neil Pearson, one of the three directors of the Shrewsbury festival, explained that the people at the back of the tent couldn't see very well.

"Our main stage is in a big tent that holds about three and a half thousand people and the view at the back is from some distance. So we decided we needed to put up screens either side of the stage. [The Denscombes] supplied footage for those screens with a five camera shoot the first time. That was 2008.

"Everything that was filmed was also recorded, purely for on-site reasons. Then the next year we thought 'Well, we can do this. So what else can we do with this technology?' We'd had some feedback and comments and some people said that they would have loved to have seen the main stage at certain points of the day - especially in the evening - but were back at their tent looking after their kids. So we thought about putting wifi around the site.

"The guy who was doing the filming - Charles Denscombe - is a real technology guy, who's interested in working on the margins of what's possible. So we got a wifi network installed around the site and in 2009 everything that was on the screens at the side of the stage was also available on the Shrewsbury festival wifi network.

"Then we looked at the costs and we had this big satellite dish on site, connecting us with broadband via a satellite. This gave us enough capacity to broadcast out as well.

"We needed the satellite for the free wifi - which allowed people to tweet and Facebook about the festival - but in 2010 we were able to webcast the festival and last year 14,500 people in 35 countries watched it."

I first became aware of live webcasting as a result of the buzz around the American festival Bonnaroo this year, which webcast Radiohead's headlining show among others. The buzz among my friends was unavoidable. I knew it was happening because I read them talking about it on Facebook and Twitter beforehand and then I read about it afterwards on Facebook, eventually tuning in to have a look for myself. I caught a replay.

Charles provided the same service for Shrewsbury last year and believes that he's doing something for the first time. "We think of ourselves as the UK's first micro-broadcaster. No one can compete with us because by comparison with traditional outside broadcasting - involving cameramen, cranes swinging around and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment - we could almost turn up for free.

"We're two retired teachers and an eight year old transit van. But we run a system that produces broadcast quality, high definition, high volume television, which we can produce with no intrusion to the paying audience."

This is possible because of a network of static cameras placed around the stage, operated remotely and robotically by one person in the transit. This is usually Heather, who does the vision mixing, although they have an enthusiastic crew of around 12.

"Also we're able to give the performers a DVD of their performance 20 minutes after it's over, to take away and use as they wish. What we often find is that they come back to us and ask for a small amount of re-editing and for us to help them put it up on YouTube."

This year's Shrewsbury tickets, which went on sale in December, were sold out by April, and I wonder whether this might be partly because of Shrewsbury's presence on YouTube. From the point of view of this blog, when I'm looking for video footage to embed in a post to illustrate what a musician does - which, when you think about it, is absolutely central to successfully conveying what I'm on about - I have chosen Shrewsbury footage over and over again because it's high definition and professionally edited, making it miles better than nearly everything else. I was a fan of Charles' and Heather's work before I even knew they existed.

When I spoke to someone from the Cambridge festival - broadcast by Sky - a couple of weeks ago they were only 92 per cent sold out and it's hard to see what else the difference could be? Sky Arts - where Cambridge will be shown this year - is only available to those with a Sky subscription and then only when Sky chooses to broadcast it, whereas Shrewsbury is available for free 24 hours a day, all year round. Ask yourself: which is the better marketing proposal?

Webcasting the festival and then making the footage available is, for practical purposes, exactly the same model as hearing music on the radio several times before deciding to buy a CD. Watching footage from Bonnaroo made me want to go there as well as appreciate the musicians. Obviously, a strong web presence also enhances a festival's appeal to advertisers. 

It's as if someone has pulled all the cabling out of the back of the old model of how to market music and festivals, and is rewiring it for the digital age.  

"I've come to see that there are two types of performers," Mr Denscombe said. "One, who is usually American - let's call them the Thompsons - question what we're up to when they see there are cameras and want to know what their cut is. These guys are used to being filmed for television. But then there are the folk singers who haven't two beans to rub together - which is most of them - who are absolutely delighted with our services because if they had to pay for them in totality they probably couldn't afford them."

So the Denscombes' way of doing things works really well for individual performers, raising their profiles, as well as promoting the genre as a whole.

The Denscombes, who began their business filming nativity plays and weddings, are pushing at the limits of what's technologically possible, using their wits and the technical and engineering skills they learnt partly while they were helping people to pass their GCSE technology. Mrs Denscombe describes her husband as "a bit of an inventor".

They have used the money they got when they retired from teaching to build their outside broadcast van and now they're looking for more work.

* If you run a music festival that's looking to shore up its position in the festival calendar, or know a band with a tour planned that wants to build some momentum, you could reach Charles and Heather here.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed, you could make it so by *liking* its Facebook page. Or follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Is the Cambridge folk festival a victim of BBC capriciousness?

It looks as if the Cambridge folk festival will be taking place without a headline sponsor
this time around, which is a shame. Its association with the Co-op came to an end last year with professions of admiration all round, there are media sponsors and a handful of grants. But I guess the recession's taking its toll.

I've been curious for a while about Cambridge's change from the BBC to Sky Arts for its TV coverage since someone pointed out some Co-op banners to me and commented that the BBC would effectively be advertising the Co-op if it happened to include any banners in its TV coverage - though its charter theoretically prevented that.

Elaine Midgley, the arts and events manager at Cambridge City Council, told me: "The festival used to have headline sponsorship from BBC Radio Two. But they changed their policy recently and don't pay cash money for the branding of events any more, though they do still provide services in kind. So they switched in 2008 from being a sponsor to being a media partner.

"Sky is a sponsor and a media partner, in the sense that they are covering the event and paying for the branding benefits that its association brings. The BBC will be doing highlights programmes and live coverage but Sky has got exclusive rights to TV, whereas the BBC's will be on national radio.

"Sky started two years ago - in 2010 - and I think they're pleased with the results. Apparently Cambridge was the third most watched event of their festival programming last year.

"The BBC has strict guidelines about the terms of what it can and can't cover: the BBC will never be our sponsor again."

I wonder whether the BBC's decision to swap from sponsor to media partner was really provoked by adherence to its own guidelines, or whether it was about saving money? After all, I can think of at least one other part of the BBC's involvement with folk music where the rules have gone out of the window.

The BBC Radio Two Folk Awards has around 170 un-named judges, many of whom have close ties to a relatively small number of bands on the folk scene - and this despite crystal clear BBC guidelines about transparency for awards. It strikes me that the Cambridge folk festival may simply have been unlucky: a victim of capriciousness on the part of a large, powerful organisation with poor internal regulation. The BBC seems to pick and choose when it sticks to its own rules, depending on what suits it at the time.

Midgley said: "Not having a headline sponsor has knocked a big hole in the festival's finances and we'll have to rectify it by finding sponsorship soon. The festival's run on a not-for-profit basis and this makes it hard to invest. We hope that the budget shortfall won't be evident at the front end of the festival - most of the cuts have been behind the scenes, in personnel."

An article in Metro last week suggested that folk festivals are bucking the downward trend in ticket sales. Wouldn't it be great if a new sponsor for Cambridge could be found before this year's event?

* See this year's line-up and buy tickets for Cambridge here. It was 92 per cent sold out when I spoke to Elaine last week. And here's a page about why you might like to sponsor the Cambridge folk fest.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page. Or follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley