Wedged between the August Bank Holiday and the party political conference season, it is an end-of-summer ritual as predictable as the browning of the leaves.
I am not talking about that great September tradition, The Last Night of the Proms. I am talking about the equally familiar Pre-Last Night of the Proms Culture War. This ritual is now as well-established as the boisterous repertoire of Rule, Britannia!/Pomp And Circumstance/Jerusalem, which, as ever, will draw the long summer of music to a close at the Royal Albert Hall next Saturday night.
Following the usual febrile debate about our post-imperial delusions or guilt or ‘what it means to be British’ – latterly played out against the backdrop of Brexit – the event itself always turns into a perfectly enjoyable evening, both inside the Royal Albert Hall and on the BBC, which beams it out around the world.
But this year, the whole event is at risk of being dragged into a deeper, more toxic debate.
It concerns an issue that has nothing to do with ‘Britishness’, let alone Sir Henry Wood’s original vision of low-cost high-quality music for all.
You can hardly allow people to wave British, EU, German, Australian or Japanese flags then say the flags of Israel and Palestine are out of bounds
However, the BBC, which puts on the whole show, certainly thinks so. That is why it has issued a new edict specifically forbidding flags ‘from proscribed groups, flags related to protest, hatred, or advertising’.
The new wording is a clear indication that the organisers are worried about the Proms being dragged into the irreconcilable and aggressive debate about the war in Gaza.
Over the years, it has been draped in gay pride flags, trans flags and EU flags without any aggro, save for the Last Night in 2019 when I spotted a furtive Brexiteer duo unfurl a ‘Brexit Now!’ banner on the floor of the hall. It was immediately yanked off them by an overwhelmingly superior force of splenetic Remainers, themselves adorned with EU flags.
After some low-level slapping, pushing and shoving, the Brexiteer pair were dragged out of the building by security.
It was all studiously ignored by the BBC cameras and the show went on without a glitch.
Eu flags and berets were delivered to the Royal Albert Hall in a protest last September
Post October 7, however, the Israel/Palestinian tensions have been of a different order of magnitude on the Richter scale of public protest. Both sides regard the mere sight of the flag of the other as a statement of genocidal intent.
On top of all that, the Just Stop Oil brigade have been rampant of late in their quest to Just Stop Everything Else. Where better to grab the headlines than at a much-loved national event live on prime-time television?
Which begs the question whether it is not time for a new campaign – to de-politicise the Proms altogether. Can we not allow this great occasion to revert to what it used to be, namely a celebration of international (not just British) music rather than a grievance contest? Should 2024, frankly, not be the year when the Proms goes back to being the Proms?
It is a nice idea but I am not holding my breath.
The Last Night controversy usually kicks off with one of the main players – a soprano or a conductor or BBC musical grandee – wistfully reflecting to an interviewer that the whole thing has become much too patriotic (the word ‘jingoistic’ is usually deployed).
Last week, the presenter, Katie Derham, made the valid point that some of the Last Night tunes are ‘classic bangers’ but with words that, though ‘of their time’, can be ‘incredibly problematic’.
She at least was more diplomatic than John Drummond, the BBC’s boss of the Proms up to his last season in 1995, who wailed his experience of the occasion ‘moved from tolerant enjoyment to almost physical revulsion’.
In 1990, the conductor Mark Elder was unceremoniously given the boot before the big night after criticising bellicose national mood ahead of the Gulf War (though he was asked back 15 years later).
Even the great Sir Simon Rattle admitted in 2021 that he usually ‘avoided’ the Last Night, adding: ‘I’ve been uneasy about some of the jingoistic elements, ever since the Falklands in 1982.’
The general point is that the whole evening would be so much more civilised if the organisers would just replace those ghastly imperialist anthems with something fluffy and non-confrontational. Kumbaya anyone?
Sir Simon Rattle said in 2021 that he was unhappy about some jingoist elements
These ‘progressive’ voices trigger the same knee-jerk response from the traditionalists who argue that the Last Night has always been brazenly, irreverently British and why can’t everyone just get over it.
There then follows the ritual intervention by politicians (from Left or Right or both) ‘calling for’ change/no change.
In 2020, a proposal to play Rule, Britannia! without any words, at the height of the Black Lives Matter campaign, attracted ridicule from the Prime Minister of the day, Boris Johnson. The BBC relented.
And then it all boils down to flags.
As far as ‘progressives’ are concerned, the profusion of Union flags is embarrassing, sinister and fuelled by dark, repressed, nativist urges. Ever since the 2016 Brexit referendum, however, there has also been a co-ordinated distribution of subsidised EU flags doled out beforehand free of charge. This is organised by a cell of diehard Remainers still fighting the eight-year-old referendum result.
Protests in 2011 led to the concert being taken off the air then rebroadcast later
There has only been once in recent years when a Prom concert has been taken off the air – in 2011 when a performance by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra Prom was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters. The BBC then re-broadcast it, minus the noises off, a few days later.
There is nothing overtly Israeli or Palestinian about Saturday’s Last Night but if the Gaza issue has now become so all-consuming that it can affect general election results (as it did) and bring hundreds of thousands onto the streets each week, it’s a safe bet that it will make its way into the Proms.
I have every sympathy for the organisers. For what constitutes a ‘protest’ flag? You can hardly allow people to wave British, EU, German, Australian or Japanese flags but then say that the flags of Israel and Palestine are out of bounds.
So I envisage plenty of the latter in the mix, with the inevitable risk of some argy-bargy given that Prommers, unlike football fans, are not segregated. I fully expect to see plenty of black and white Palestinian ‘keffiyeh’ scarves slung around the necks of people who are very much more likely to be from Penge than Palestine.
Is that a ‘protest’?
Where the security team will have to come down hard and fast is if people bring in banners or symbols. Anything suggestive of the Palestinian battle cry ‘From the river to the sea’, which is so offensive to Jewish sentiment since it presupposes the eradication of Israel, is clearly inflammatory and should warrant immediate ejection. But it won’t stop someone having a go.
Perhaps I am naive in expecting the music to wash over all of them and for the evening to take its usual joyous course. Let’s hope so. Still, if not, I suppose it makes a change from the tiresome old quarrel over whether the word ‘slaves’ should be excised from the 283-year-old chorus of Rule, Britannia!
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk