There have been two very good documentaries about very bad festivals. First, Netflix covered the hilariously awful Fyre Festival, which promised a luxury island experience in the company of supermodels but instead offered the chance to stay in a disaster relief tent eating processed cheese slices.
Then Netflix made Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, an event less hilarious but vastly more awful than Fyre, which ended with the site in flames and the National Guard trying to restore order.
BBC Three has now tried to get in on the act with Crashed: $800m Festival Fail. But the title is really just a bit of clickbait. It’s actually a business story about the collapse of Pollen, a music ticketing platform that was valued at $800m in April last year but fell into administration four months later.
The company was founded by British brothers, Callum and Liam Negus-Fancey. Pollen sold gig tickets and travel packages for music weekenders, but bills to contractors allegedly went unpaid and fans began complaining (an “intimate” VIP weekend with Justin Bieber turned out to be watching him perform an hour-long gig).
And then, as the company was about to go under, it double-charged, and in some cases triple-charged, customers for the same event, to the tune of $3.2million (Pollen admits the overcharging took place, but says it was unintentional).
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