The Guide #249: As Glastonbury has a fallow year, here’s why more much-loved culture should down tools

The festival always comes back fresher after allowing Worthy Farm to recover from its yearly musical extravaganza. Star Wars and Charli xcx could learn a thing or two

In any other year this week’s Guide would be arriving into your inbox from Worthy Farm, home of Glastonbury festival. Not in 2026 though: for the first time since the Covid pandemic, which poleaxed two consecutive years of the festival, Glasto is a no-show. The reason? It has booked in one of its occasional fallow years, which allows the dairy farmland on which the festival sits a chance to recover from a half decade of camping, trampling and moshing. It also gives its organisers a rare window to recharge their batteries and plan for the festival’s future, and its detractors a year off from declaring its headliners “the worst ever”, again.

For long-term Glasto-goers, it’s always bittersweet when the fallow year rolls around – the last was in 2018 – but this year it does feel like a bullet dodged, given that the event would have landed bang in the middle of a truly dangerous heatwave (my face, and many others, would have turned a previously undiscovered shade of beetroot). And moreover, the fallow year often works a treat: when the festival returns the year after, it tends to be re-energised, with new stages, stronger lineups and well rested people running the show.

In fact, I’d argue that Glastonbury’s fallow period is so successful others might do well to follow its lead. Perhaps not other festivals, which with their tight overheads and profit margins, require punters rolling in every year to survive. But certainly other cultural institutions could do with a breather every now and again. Might Eurovision, flatlining in the ratings, and beset by controversy, benefit from a year off in order to resolve political tensions, lure back boycotting countries and take a look at fixing its easily gameable voting system? Or could Star Wars, suffering from audience apathy and fatigue over its overly congested fleet of films and TV shows, hit pause on the universe’s relentless expansion? Don’t worry LucasFilm, the audience will still be there when you get back; they’ve waited decades for prequels and sequels in the past.

For some pop stars – in an age where constant content is expected, even demanded – a year off could also be liberating. Taylor Swift, after a long period of near-total ubiquity seems to be in a brief, welcome fallow moment, musically at least (a pretty gigantic wedding on the horizon is keeping her firmly in the public eye). Her sole contribution in 2026 has been a song for the Toy Story 5 soundtrack, heralded by critics as a return to form after the disappointment of The Life of a Showgirl, a rushed, content-machine-pleasing release that earned Swift career-worst reviews (not to mention speculation about possible burnout). Perhaps Charli xcx, still on an exhausting cycle of post-Brat self-promotion (endless touring, six film roles, a new album announced …), could do with a fallow year too. Adele, for one, has shown the value – both commercially and in terms of personal wellbeing – of regularly receding from the spotlight.

A fallow year would also solve problems posed by overexposure. Take Romesh Ranganathan, a far more talented comic than he’s often given credit for, but one who has become a punchline for his sheer ever-presence on primetime TV. (Reviewing Ranganathan’s latest gameshow, the Guardian’s Rhik Samadder wondered if the comedian’s “auto email responder is a copy-paste of the word YES”.) The best way to combat that? Yep, a fallow year.

TV drama, once a form fully committed to the yearly churn, now seems to largely operate under its own sort of fallow-period logic of sorts – although, those long breaks between series aren’t down to anyone taking time off; it is simply that production lasts far longer than it once did. Still, there are exceptions to that new norm, and I do wonder if The Bear, a show we once praised for its year-on-year punctuality, might have actually done with a fallow period at some point, given the diminishing returns of its later seasons (though I am hearing positive things about the show’s fifth and final run, which landed on Disney+ today). And lord knows there are plenty of shows in the fast-and-loose world of reality TV that could do with an enforced, extended holiday, either to tighten up ethics, standards and practices or just to refresh a stale format. (Be honest, had you any idea a series of Love Island was currently airing?)

This is all a little fanciful, of course. Vanishingly few shows, film franchises and performers could realistically just book in a year off for rest and renewal: fan demand; share prices; and most importantly, people’s need to make a living, dictate otherwise. Glastonbury is a complete outlier in that regard: the festival is not-for-profit; its founders have an entirely separate stream of cattle-based income; and many of its employees have other jobs away from the festival too. It’s a situation that isn’t necessarily replicable elsewhere.

Still, in our ceaseless 24/7, feeding-funnel culture, there is definitely something to be said for pausing for a period of reflection and renewal. Which is why I’ll be back with the rest of the newsletter after a short fallow period of my own, focusing on my other great passion: dairy farming … OK, OK, fine – I’ll be eating crunchy nut cornflakes while doomscrolling on my phone.

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