The changing face of the BBC Proms

There are two faces of the BBC Proms. The faces are somewhat at odds with each other. The one that everyone knows, whether they have an interest in music or not, is the Last Night of the Proms. It’s a concert consisting of a series of small musical items, or ‘lollipops’ as Sir Thomas Beecham used to call them. It culminates in a sequence of sea shanties, ‘Rule, Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

The other face, much more substantial, is the series of concerts that precede that last one, from mid-July to mid-September, still centred on the Royal Albert Hall. Surprisingly, many people don’t seem to know anything about that aspect at all. A year or two back, getting a taxi to a Prom, I was asked by the driver if I had my little flag to wave and a silly hat to sing along in. As I was actually going to the long-delayed UK premiere of Per Nørgård’s third symphony, it might not have been quite the thing.

The Last Night has been the subject of furious debate and public grandstanding over recent years. The patriotic element has been called racist, and populist posturing has demanded that it be dropped altogether. The fact of the matter, however, is that almost nothing about the Last Night, a concert totally unrepresentative of the whole enterprise, has or will be changed. What has utterly changed is the rest of the season.

I first went to the Proms 40 years ago, in 1983. I came down from Sheffield for a week and went to every single Prom in those seven days. For the first and last time, I stood up in the arena, paying (I think) £2 a go.