Midway through Channel 4’s annual seaside pop festival on Sunday, gargantuan stormclouds roared in off the Bristol Channel, drenching and freezing the mostly young crowd. With thousands of people trapped on a narrow Gaza Strip of seafront, waterlogged and strewn with debris, the fenced-in site began to feel like a disaster zone — an Altamont for the Facebook generation.

Fortunately, the sunshine returned and conditions slowly improved on the packed site. The organisers claim that 45,000 people attended, which seems excessive for such a compact site, but the festival was certainly crowded both onstage and off.

Designed for television, T4 on the Beach crammed more than 25 artists into little more than five hours. Each bite-sized performance was short, loud and tailored to the fast-forward attention span of adolescents wired on cider and high-sugar energy drinks.

The musical menu divided into two groups: charismatic performers with something to say and depressingly slick, Simon Cowell-friendly, stage-school pop androids. Firmly in the first category, the Gossip singer Beth Ditto kicked off the afternoon’s entertainment with a fantastic hot-pink minidress and a fistful of punk-funk attitude. “Latitude, eat your heart out!” she roared. “We got the real beach!”

Diversity, the dynamic street dancers who in May beat Susan Boyle to become X Factor champions, also put on an amazing display of moonwalking, child-tossing acrobatics. Equally dazzling was the Noisettes singer Shingai Shoniwa, whose ten-minute catwalk strut managed to out-vamp Diana Ross, Madonna and Amy Winehouse combined. Compared with her, the choreographed girl-group poses and matching Stepford outfits of the Saturdays felt sexless, soulless and one-dimensional.

T4 on the Beach is not a place for lyrical or musical subtlety. Thus Calvin Harris, N-Dubz and the headliner Dizzee Rascal all got the crowd bouncing with their shouty beatbox populism. Meanwhile, Florence and the Machine’s ethereal, harp-plucking Kate Bush-isms were largely lost on the stiff Atlantic breeze blowing through Weston-super-Mare.

Basement Jaxx had the right idea too, spicing their brief set with eye-blitzing visuals and hyperactive dancers dressed as animals. Their wildly gyrating singer Felix Burton may have looked rather like a junior cabinet minister whose brandy has been spiked with Ecstasy, but their stomping disco-pop classic Where’s Your Head At? still went down a storm in Somerset.

Almost literally.

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