Visualising the Proms

It suddenly struck me that my Prom habits are a little paradoxical. I've tended to think of a TV broadcast of a Prom as distracting and at home prefer to listen to the audio on Radio 3 with no visuals except any my imagination might conjure up in my head. As the cliche has it, radio has better pictures.

Yet when I can I prefer , it occurs to me, to see as well as hear a Prom in the Albert Hall rather than listen to it at home; and yet I don't think of that as distracting. I seldom sit there with my eyes closed. So tonight I feel I ought to try to resolve the paradox. I didn't really concentrate  on the China Phil's Prom, but it's broadcast on BBC 4 tonight. Hopefully including the encore, which everyone seems to think was a lot of fun and which I missed altogether.

Television analogue audio is generally awful, but since I have a more hi-fi-amenable set up now, I might as well use it. So I shall watch in HD, and, hopefully listen the same way, with the digital output of my Humax tuner through a digital-to-analogue converter and my serious hi-fi system.

I will, probably, be a little distracted, as I sometimes am when the BBC cameras are in the Albert Hall. As I sometimes am in the theatre or the opera. I blame it on my mis-spent youth, some of which was spent as an Assistant Stage Manager for a theatre.

Which means in Covent Garden, I can't help but check out the lighting rigs and thinking about the technicalities of the scene changes while I'm watching the activity and the singers on the stage. So it is sometimes in the Albert Hall, for all the BBC's cameramen are dressed to impinge as little as possible on the audience's attention, from head-to-toe in black. I always wonder exactly what is on those notepads attached to the sides of the cameras that the cameramen (and women) flip the pages of every few minutes.

Instructions from the director as to when to move, when to zoom, when to pull back, I presume. I can't imagine that the camera operators are all following marked-up miniature scores, though it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out some of them are more knowledgeable about music than the tennis that presumably some, or all, of them were filming at Wimbledon shortly before.

I know, though, I shall be distracted by one thing. I can't help it, but I'm always fascinated by most directors' ability to focus on the instruments of the orchestra as their parts appear in the score. So I shall be looking out for when Camera 3 is still on the violins when Camera 4 should be on the horns . . .

Now, should it be gunpowder green, jasmine, or Assam for the interval?