Thursday 17:00 OK, let’s be upfront: it is impossible to truly recreate the Glastonbury experience at home unless your home happens to be a 900-acre farm full of agitprop installations, fortysomething Faithless fans, a wide variety of new-age healing practitioners and open pits of human waste. But while we will never get back the lost Glastonbury – and what a Glastonbury it would have been: Diana Ross, Robyn and the Happy Mondays is our kind of 50th birthday party – if you can just lower expectations a tad there is still some fun to be had next weekend. OK, it’s hard to completely lose yourself between your bathroom and the front room. But part of the magic of Glastonbury comes from the sheer commitment: giving up home comforts and signing up to a weekend of the unknown. So let’s do this properly. Get in the shower and have a deep scrub, it will be your last for the weekend. 18:00 Decant all your spirits into plastic bottles, stick on a denim gilet and a pair of wellies. Fill your car, or failing that a bathtub, with three packets of Percy Pigs, a bag of satsumas and an unlabelled plastic bottle of water that’s been sitting around since last year but is probably fine. Sit uncomfortably for a few minutes while listening to The Breeze radio, the south-west’s more relaxing music mix. Keep texting in that “you’re on your way to Glastonbury” till you get a shout-out. Congratulations, you’ve made it! 20:00 The first thing that hits you when you arrive at the real Glastonbury is the smell: that single-origin blend of bonfires, cowpats and long-drop toilets. Recreating such scents at home is probably a health and safety hazard, but you can still make a nod to the Pilton aroma by sticking a big pot of chai tea on the boil and lighting a few log fire candles. It’s not quite the same but once the no-showering kicks in you’ll start to get those festy top notes. 22:00 A number of hardcores over on the Glasthomebury Facebook group are planning to camp in their back gardens. Fair play, but if you don’t fancy having that conversation with your neighbour, perhaps a better midway point is to move your bedding into the front room and set up a bit of a den by scattering fairy lights and wet wipes across the floor. Pour yourself a lukewarm G&T, order a takeaway with an inexplicable amount of halloumi in it and settle in. BBC Four is showing Julien Temple’s dreamy 2006 video essay Glastonbury, a perfect primer on the festival’s anti-establishment heritage. Don’t over-exert yourself tonight, there’s a big weekend ahead. Friday 10:00 Rise and shine! Time to treat yourself to the Glastonbury breakfast: an ancient grains macrobiotic vegan Buddah bowl and a pint of Tuborg. 13:00 The BBC has a mammoth archive of live performances from past years to watch over the weekend, including a dedicated iPlayer channel and classic sets going out on BBC Two and BBC Four in primetime. Just like at the real Glastonbury, though, it is still far too early to be watching any live music. Instead, head to the online Green Fields where Liz Eliot, the area’s curator for decades, has put on a special programme of events. “It’s been really disappointing,” she says, “because I’m 80 this year and was hoping to bow out of this role, but we’re still trying to get that spiritual feel of our area over, while being a little tongue in cheek.” You’ll be able to get your penknife out for craft demonstrations and enjoy free online yoga and qigong. Those missing the gentle back and forth of the festival’s many spoken-word events can hear Sir David King, a scientific adviser to the Blair government, talk about the links between climate change and Covid-19. 18:00 It is impossible to ignore the fact that, for some, Glastonbury is a weekend for experimentation with certain substances. Whether that is part of your normal festival experience, it’s probably safe to say that your flatmate isn’t going to appreciate it if you’re in the living room sweating through a T-shirt and flailing your limbs to Frankie Knuckles while they’re trying to teach a Skype numeracy lesson to their year twos. Stay away from any hard stuff: instead we give you permission to crack open your first pear cider of the weekend, a beverage that was basically invented at Glastonbury and now takes up three aisles at Sainsbury’s. 20:00 This would have been Kendrick Lamar’s debut headline performance at the festival. In the weeks since the killing of George Floyd, protesters have played Lamar’s music through PAs, boomboxes and megaphones as they demanded an end to racial injustice. This then would have been an impossibly powerful performance, and, whether or not he returns in a year, coronavirus has robbed Kendrick of the biggest stage in music at this decisive moment. For a greater grounding in the politics of his music, try out the Dissect podcast, which has two whole seasons dedicated to his back catalogue. 22:00 Weird to think that the headline sets played by Beyoncé (2011) and Jay-Z (2008), which are being shown at 10pm on BBC Two and 11.30pm on BBC Four respectively, came just before these artists’ imperial phases. Indeed, it was arguably these performances that pushed them from being mere world-conquering artists to the only two pop stars your mum knows. Jay’s set was full of peerless cuts from Blueprints 1 and 2 that he doesn’t play live these days, and the unlikely highlight of Beyoncé’s Sunday night set was the somewhat forgotten Irreplaceable: the contrast of her glitzy performance and worse-for-wear sunburnt Somerseters screaming “to the left, to the left” remains one of the most moving things ever to happen on that stage. Likely to make you have a little cry. 00:00 Don’t wanna be a killjoy but we are saving it for the big one on Sat so have yourself a hot chocolate and get some rest. 14:00 It wouldn’t be Glastonbury without bumping into a celeb who hasn’t been to bed. Spend the next 30 minutes tweeting ALL RIGHT M8! YOU LOOK WRECKED! at Nick Grimshaw and wait to see if he replies. 19:00 Glastonbury raises more than £3m for good causes each year, so the event’s cancellation will leave a shortfall in the budgets of Greenpeace, WaterAid and others. They are selling merch on the site to help, though; the tea towel is particularly nice and lets people know you were there (in the kitchen). On Saturday (20 Jun) you can also catch the end of the Greenpeace field’s virtual party to celebrate 50 years of activism with sets from Georgia, Rodrigo y Gabriela and – obvs – Billy Bragg. If it’s emotional healing you need, BBC Two are showing Adele’s 2016 headline slot at 9.30pm. 00:00 OK, this is it – the all-nighter. Hopefully you’ve got some plastic bottles of Ribena and whisky left, because we are going in. Gather your household together at the front door: this should take an hour of going back and forth, fetching jumpers and all going to the toilet. Next, leave your house and wander around trying to find somewhere in your local area that looks like a vibe (while socially distancing, of course). Occasionally lose each other then spend 20 minutes trying to meet up by shouting: “I’M AT THE 27TH LAMPPOST ON THE RIGHT!” Eventually agree to meet back at home where the Shangri-La area is livestreaming DJ sets all night (in preparation for its own VR festival, Lost Horizon, a week later) and Radio 1’s Essential Mix will be streaming classic Glasto sets from 1am. Keep going, then head to the “stone circle”, which you can fashion in your garden out of some bathroom shelving and pebbles. Take some pots with you for drumming, and pop your head out the door to see if any youths want to sell you a balloon. Keep going until sunrise and then pass out in the kitchen. Sunday 11:00 After your big night out, you’re going to need to recharge. The Healing Fields are holding daily “online meditations for love, health and peace”. If getting a moment of peace is difficult in your house, there will also be storytelling around a tipi fire over in the online Green Fields with further fun throughout the weekend at a virtual Kidzfield. RAIN BREAK! Rain is as crucial to the Glastonbury experience as leaving all your best mates to spend the entire night with some rando you went to school with. This weekend should be no different, so if there are scattered showers, head out with your umbrella and headphones and blast some of the festival specials. Sounds of the 70s With Johnnie Walker on Sunday afternoon will be playing rarely heard performances from the festival’s first decade, and BBC Sounds has a dedicated Glastonbury channel with loads of full sets to pick from. If you want to go the whole hog, get a pair of those moisturising socks from Superdrug or Boots, which are basically plastic bags filled with lotion; it will feel just like cold mud has seeped into your wellies. 18:30 Jo Whiley and Mark Radcliffe are hosting a special BBC Two show with the best of the Sunday afternoon legends slot, so expect to see Lionel Richie, Dolly Parton, Brian Wilson, ELO and plenty of bad puns on flags. For many revellers, this is normally the moment when the cumulative comedown hits them and they realise Dancing on the Ceiling is actually the most beautiful song ever written. Perhaps, in the cold light of day, these cruise-shippy moments won’t feel quite so special, but boy is it nice to see crowds of people touching each other again. 21:30 At the turn of the millennium, when his voice was still impeccable, David Bowie treated Somerset to a shameless greatest hits set where he reminisced about his early-morning set at the first Glasto in 1971. Bowie was incredibly uncomfortable about this performance being filmed, and so, at the time, viewers only got to see a few songs before the BBC cut to some pre-recorded scenes at the festival (including a bizarre segment where Billy Bragg took the then-Spectator editor Boris Johnson around the site). So this performance (airing on BBC Two at 9.30pm) has never been seen on telly in its entirety before – something to savour. 23:00 Complete the annual tradition by calling your boss to say you think you’re coming down with something and you might need a couple of days’ bed rest. Now you’re free to lose yourself: OK, you’re not going to get invited into a yurt by someone called Cosmo to hear about how 5G is calcifying your pineal gland, but you can at least get Primal Scream on the iPlayer, scrape together the last of your shrapnel for a vegan energy ball and finish off any remaining supplies. Tomorrow it’s back to the grindstone, but let’s enjoy this one last night ...