First it was new and exciting, then it became ‘child of WOMAD, then it was free for everyone and now it is no more – at least not for this year.

Reading’s Heavenly Planet Festival won’t be happening – at least for 2009. It’s probably for the best. Better to cut your losses than have a farce on your hands, and it seems that we council taxpayers won’t be picking up the bill – some good news at least.

Reading had supported WOMAD loyally since David Sutton and Martin Salter brought the event to the town. When WOMAD upped sticks many politicians felt they were ‘a bunch of ungrateful hippies’ – though we were all too polite to say so.

Reading put bums on seats, or rather feet in dust, for WOMAD The site sold out for both day and weekend tickets. Reading people embraced the event as “a bit odd, but a good laugh”.

So it was hard to understand why WOMAD moved their ‘earth aware’ festival from the middle of a town with amenities, hotels, a mainline station, and a loyal local audience to an entirely car-borne destination in the middle of nowhere 14 miles outside of Swindon. How very sustainable.

But WOMAD at Rivermead was getting tired. The same format year after year, the same stalls selling overpriced hippy tat, the same cheesecloth clad cowboys selling three falafel, a handful of lettuce and a small spoonful of yoghurt for a fiver. A FIVER – and all on an extra-bendy paper plate with all the tensile strength of kitchen roll plus drinks at a price to delight the Chief Medical Officer. Being ripped off is par for the course at festivals -being ripped off in a family friendly, environmentally aware, equally opportunities, one-world kind of way is meant to make it more palatable. It doesn’t.

Reading’s attempt to do WOMAD, the sequel, was a mistake. World music is a minority interest. WOMAD became popular in Reading despite the music. They pulled the crowds by having at least one big old-stager act with a few foot tapping numbers that enough people had heard of to get them off their sofas on a Friday night. Something with a bit more pull than the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain (all of whom are fine musicians of course, but you get my drift).

Creating something different to WOMAD should have been the starting point – not trying to do more of the same. I’m not even sure the notion of using a world music festival to promote diversity was ever successful – the audience looked solidly pink and middle class to me – including those who painted themselves green for the weekend.

And as for the name ‘Heavenly Planet’ is the kind of pious political correctness that makes me want to drive a Humvee through the campsite wielding an AK47.

Making Heavenly Planet free festival was never a runner. My unscientific sample of the Reading public raised all sorts of concerns about site security, the ‘wrong vibe’ and the ‘wrong crowd’. These might have been lame excuses, but they were being made by  exactly the sort of folk who fell for WOMAD year after year.

The Council’s politicians, led by Councillor Hoskin, half of the Labour Group’s answer to Gavin and Stacey, went along with every stage of the Heavenly Planet saga – nobody wanted to appear a kill joy. Now we will get wisdom after the event despite from those whose balls have turned out to be less than crystal.

You can market a product brilliantly, but if it is the wrong product people still won’t buy it. Heavenly Planet was a product nobody wanted.