BBC struggles to explain Sir Paul McCartney’s absence from Glastonbury set on iPlayer

The BBC was on Sunday night facing questions over why it had failed to upload Sir Paul McCartney’s Glastonbury performance to the iPlayer more than 24 hours after it was broadcast on TV.

Sir Paul’s set on Saturday night was billed as the headline act of the festival, including a duet with John Lennon who was beamed out on the big screen and a surprise appearance by Bruce Springsteen.

It was broadcast on BBC One on Saturday night - albeit with a one-hour delay which the broadcaster put down to “the complexity of broadcasting an event of this scale”.

But many licence fee payers are demanding to know why it has not yet appeared on the broadcaster’s catch-up site, despite the majority of other Glastonbury performances appearing online.

The official iPlayer Twitter account replied to one frustrated fan on Sunday afternoon promising that it would be online in the next couple of hours.

But as of late on Sunday night, the former Beatles star’s performance had not made it online, only audio of it existed on BBC Sounds.

The BBC Sounds Twitter account tweeted at 8.13pm:

“Why’s it not on iPlayer?”, one fan then asked.

“When will it be on BBCiPlayer”, said another.

It comes after viewers were already left disappointed on Saturday at not being able to watch the show live. The broadcast started on BBC One and Radio 2 at 10.30pm, an hour after it started.

In a statement, the BBC said that “due to the complexity of broadcasting an event of this scale and the volume of performances we cover, there is sometimes variation between performances taking place and their transmission.”