Oh, What a Tangled Web. . .

This is utterly ridiculous. If you try to get information on the recent past, or future, or even today's, Prom broadcasts, the BBC website's Prom section simply says "No events available".

It was bad enough when last year the BBC stopped putting programme notes on line; because, they said, not enough people (however many, or few that may be) accessed them; and they couldn't format them for smartphones.

Or, more truthfully, I suspect, it was all just too much trouble. And now, for information about composers, we get paragraphs copied and pasted from Wikipedia. . . Which is not always anything like an adequately informative source in this respect.

While the BBC is archiving the R3 broadcasts, its own website is not easy to navigate. ("No episodes available"one link told me.) Elsewhere, a Proms page suggests that concerts will only be repeated only on Sundays. They aren't: the Radio 3 schedules (as would the Radio Times if you buy it) show most are being repeated in the 1400hrs slot on weekday afternoons. A warning, here, however: some (like the Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier) won't be, presumably because of copyright or repeat fee reasons, and they tend to come to a shuddering halt when the Edinburgh Festival gets going, so many of the later August and September concerts won't be repeated.

Look, BBC, this is a shambles. How the hell can you even pretend any more this is a 'world' season, if, because of time differences, half the damn world can't easily find out how to listen to any of the concerts any more?

Is there any point in asking if, BBC, you can get your website builders' collective elbows disentangled from their collective arses? Just for the sake of, you know, the sort of people you're supposed to be broadcasting for. They used to call them listeners, remember?

Not 'page viewers'.

NB: after getting there by some devious route, without the help of the BBC website, the archived Proms broadcasts can be found here. Available to listen for seven days after the performance. Lets hope this link works for the duration.

(The audio quality of the iPlayer is pretty good. Sadly, I don't have access to the Beeb's tecchies any more, so I don't know what kind or degree of compression they're using, but while it can't handle the dynamic range of a big orchestra or the Albert Hall organ, in hi-fi terms it's not bad. Best heard through good headphones or an external amplifier and speakers; not most laptop's internal speakers.)