Playground immortality is what every mousy-haired, pizza-faced, shy teen dreams of. I used to watch the impossibly beautiful girls from the year above me toss their shampoo-ad-perfect blonde hair while they giggled with the stunning stars of the school football team who flocked around them and I'd think "I'd only attract a crowd like that if I was handing out tenners".

But against all the odds, I finally got my 15 minutes of playground fame.

Back in my early teens, pop magazine Smash Hits was my bible. I devoured every issue, poring over the song lyrics it printed to decipher maddeningly incomprehensible lines from the latest chart hits. And I loved that it had its own unique lexicon, a code that its readers understood but their parents didn't. In short, Smash Hits was the epitome of cool.

My classmate Heidi was a rabid New Kids On The Block fan and she'd convinced her dad to drive her and a friend to London for the Smash Hits Poll Winners' Party, a huge annual BRITS-style show on which top pop acts performed (New Kids were headlining that year) and stars received awards voted for by readers. And it was broadcast live on telly.

When she invited me along, I was beyond excited – and I thought of a way to ensure we were caught on camera. On the day, while nervously waiting for the show to start, I discreetly pulled a piece of yellow plastic from my pocket and started to blow into it. It was a three-ft inflatable banana. Fyffes had given it to my local greengrocer as a promotional tool, and he'd agreed to lend it to me.

I hugged that giant banana for the entire concert. And when I got home and watched the show on tape, when the camera panned around the massive crowd, a flash of yellow caught my eye – and there we were.

I'd told everyone about my planned banana trick, so at school on Monday Heidi and I stood smiling in the playground, tossing our greasy hair and giggling while the stunning stars of the school football team flocked around us impressed that they'd seen us on TV.

As an acnified adolescent from the sticks, being on telly for a few seconds was as close to "cool" as I was going to get.

Fast-forward two decades and I'm standing at V Festival last Saturday struggling to see Oasis perform through a sea of flags held aloft by the crowd.

Flags have become a music festival menace. Just ask anyone at this year's Glastonbury who only caught brief glimpses of Bruce Springsteen's set when the wind blew the crowd's giant flags which shielded him from view. After a deluge of complaints from festival-goers angry at not being able to see the bands, flags have been banned from this year's Reading and Leeds festivals.

I understand someone at a music festival keeping a flag where they camp to help them find their tent, but taking it into the crowd while bands are playing is just plain selfish.

Flag-wavers say "if you don't like it, move", but at a major music festival the crowd can still be packed tightly when you're standing far away from the stage, so it's easier said than done. And anyway, why should I move? I don't care that you support Plymouth Argyle or that you "like cheese".

Face it – you're just trying to get on telly. And if you were 13, I could understand it. But you're adults with no teenage excuse.

So why spoil everyone else's fun?