I laughed at the selfie-seeking Fyre Festival fools – but was inspired by a happy story of hope behind the scenes

I watched the Netflix documentary du jour FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened with slack-jawed horror this week.

FYRE charted the rise, fall and imprisonment of one Billy McFarland, who, along with the misguided but not intentionally wicked rapper Ja Rule, attempted to pull off an exclusive Coachella-style festival on an island in the Bahamas.

The first thing McFarland did was to overpay a posse of top supermodels to endorse the upcoming party of the decade. The resulting promo vid shows these beauties cavorting on the beach, playing with the famous Bahamian swimming pigs. At this point even I was tempted. A festival with swimming pigs? Now that’s my kind of vibe; in fact, turn the music down, I want to talk to these pigs.

Then came the price tag, luxury packages were up for tens of thousands of pounds, but then exclusive costs, right? Swimming with pigs has got to be worth a few bob?

Wrong, the whole thing was a scam and in the non-event, 300 people pitched up to find their luxury accommodation consisted of flimsy storm tents and drenched bedding. The camp looked like a disaster zone and on-site food provisions consisted of cheese sandwiches with a salad garnish. There was a great deal of schadenfreude to enjoy while watching this documentary. Let’s face it, we all love seeing rich kids come unstuck and no one died.

However, featured in the documentary was a local woman who described losing her life’s savings to this ridiculous fantasy. Maryanne Rolle’s island catering company had fed and watered the local labourers working on McFarland’s mad vision in the months leading up to the festival, with Rolle good-naturedly footing the bills. Apparently paying the supermodel Bella Hadid thousands of dollars for an Instagram hashtag was one thing, paying this woman was another.

Suddenly the documentary wasn’t so funny – rich kids getting kicked in the wallet is worth a few chuckles, bankrupting the locals isn’t.

Just like the recent Bros documentary which masked a huge number of issues beneath its “oh so hilarious” facade, FYRE hinted at the dark side of our Instagram-addicted culture. This was a festival sold on excess, it wasn’t about the music, the bands were inconsequential compared to the selfie potential. The sums of money for supposedly out-of-this-world sleeping quarters were grotesque, because people buying tickets weren’t buying a weekend of fun, they were buying a free pass to show the rest of the world via their social media accounts that they’d made it.

The expense was a badge of honour, it screamed private jets and lobster on the beach with supermodels, but in the end it just didn’t happen, Fyre Festival was a blackhearted Grimm’s fairytale for the 21st century, it was built on greed and vanity and as it all came tumbling down, the brains behind the operation got a six-year prison sentence.

With any luck, the fallout taught a few young people with more money than sense a lesson about shiny things, and hopefully some top models got rapped on the knuckles for not being completely transparent about sponsored tweets and Instagram posts. As for Maryanne Rolle, who spent her savings feeding the crew, well there’s some good news folks. A crowd-funded campaign has already recovered her costs and more.

Hoorah, a much-needed sliver lining for 2019. Not everyone has a hollow heart.

With so little to sing and dance about so far this year, we do need to dig deep to find some life-affirming gems.

Yup, I’ve got one. Call the Midwife is back. I love Call the Midwife and will fight to the death for the remote control on a Sunday night because 8-9pm is my time.

Fact is, as a 58-year-old woman, I love seeing babies being born and even though I was eating a fish pie at the time, I found myself gritting my teeth and bearing down with the girl having triplets, coming out in a sweat of sympathy as she delivered baby after baby.

Call the Midwife is a beautifully made programme, it’s visually fabulous and as historically accurate as you can get. Last week’s episode handled the subject of hoarding, complete with newspaper parcels of wee and poo hidden up the chimney with remarkable delicacy, and Annette Crosbie’s performance as the suffragette who’d endured force-feeding in the past was a mistress class in acting.

I’m also really enjoying The Victorian House of Arts and Crafts on BBC2, a reality show featuring period-costume-clad, modern-day designers revisiting the painstaking handmade techniques of the William Morris mob.

Obviously I’m getting soppy in my own age, but it’s hardly surprising that while this country seems intent on making a hash of its present, sometimes it feels safer to wallow in the past.