I can’t say I have a great deal of confidence in those people who run the Tomorrowland festival at the moment. Earlier this year, I reported on how they’d cancelled their 2021 festival – because for reasons totally unfathomable to me, they never bothered to actually clear the event with the authorities first.

Now it appears they’ve come up with an utterly hare-brained idea. Let’s have the 2022 festival run over three weekends! Yes, they’ve seriously suggested this.Tomorrowland spokesperson Debby Wilmsen told Het Laatste Nieuws they “really have to do this to cushion the financial hangover” of not being able to open for the past two years.

Whilst I sympathise with their plight, I can’t help but think this idea shows they’ve lost their marbles. First of all, how are they going to fill the schedule for three weekends? Seeing that all these festivals are like McDonald’s – no matter which one you go to, the menu is pretty much the same – I’m curious to see how they’ll arrange it with the pretty small number of regulars who dominate the circuit.

Secondly, where is the thought for the average person in all this? If you have effectively three festivals over three weekends, you’re effectively forcing people to choose which one they’ll attend. Very few can afford to attend three weekends of festivals in a short time – and when you include travel costs and physical effort, they’re asking one hell of a lot of their fans.

Does Tomorrowland really have the numbers behind it to fill three weekends in a row? If they reduce capacity at each one, it defeats the purpose of holding three. If they don’t reduce capacity, they risk being left with egg on their face. Tomorrowland almost certainly know a lot of festivals are suffering from low ticket sales – and the big boys aren’t totally immune either.

The expression “last throw of the dice” keeps coming to mind…