Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. . .What is it with these youf proms?

I won't be donning flip-flops, board shorts and spilling vodka from a duty-free litre bottle over the Gallery  at any of the 'youf' Proms this season. But I don't see what good Proms like No 37 will do. I mean, I went to the Frank Zappa late night Prom back in 2013, and I can't say I noticed any of that audience going to any of the other Proms that week.

And these 'Ibiza' Proms? Apart from the total unlikelihood of any of those audiences getting infused with a sudden overwhelming desire to hear a Bach Mass, a Mahler 6, Mozart's Entfuhrung or an evening of Frank Sinatra songs (I ask you . . .) what are they for?

(Actually, who are those Frank Sinatra songs for? Or the Steven Sondheim Prom; or Fiddler on the Roof? Does some idiot at the BBC entertain some notion of a mass migration of audiences from The Lion King or Cats out of the West End to the Albert Hall? Or even from  the 'multimedia' Sinatra at the Palladium that'll be running at the same time?)

Some years ago I was talking to some young people who were making a pilot for a series about kids clubbing for Channel 4. It was, they thought, a good series to be scheduled for late on Friday nights. I asked what their demographic was. "Eighteen to twenty-four year olds who go clubbing," they said.

"Oh," I said, "but late on Friday nights, isn't that just what they'll be doing instead?"

Somehow, the anomaly hadn't struck them. I think a handful of episodes did eventually go out: on Monday nights. When (I have done this in my time!) no-one is really in a fit state to want to relive the weekend that probably finished only in the early hours of a Monday morning . . .



I'm not snobbish. I wasn't brought up on classical music myself, just learned to like it from listening to Radio 3 over the years. And every time I go to a concert, an opera, or a Prom I depress myself looking around for—and all too often failing to see—anyone much under fifty (or sadly, even under sixty) and seldom anyone in their twenties who isn't fairly obviously a music student. Not even in the Arena at the Albert Hall.



At Covent Garden recently, I sat near a bunch of kids, obviously 'doing drama' somewhere (I don't think Brecht is on the syllabus these days) who'd been, by the look of it, dragooned in to seeing Mahagonny. I was actually very keen on Brecht when I was at school and at about the same age. But they couldn't wait to get their thumbs on their iPhones. And I didn't spot them again, not even for Il Turco in Italia, which they might well have found funnier, and even a bit 'relevant'.


It would, of course, be great if the Albert Hall was flooded with teens and twenties, but it is not going to happen via Pete Tong or Mista Jam. Nor, I think, through 'ten easy bite-size pieces' that any youngster will have heard on Classic FM if they actually listened to it.