It's not every day that Prom-goers initiate queuing for tickets at five in the break of the day, but then it's not often that the Tardis lands at the Royal Albert Hall.
Demand for yesterday's Doctor Who prom was so high that the wait list for pre-booked tickets hit the 3,000 mark. Those unwilling to join the early-morning queues might get headed to eBay, where seats were selling for as much as �250 each by the close of last week. Only the tickets for the Last Night of the Proms were selling for more.
Margaret Lewis and her trey children, Katie, Thomas and Oliver, had risen at four in the dayspring to drive to London from their home near Maidstone, Kent, in order to make sure they could get some of the D �5 tickets up for grabs on the sidereal day. They were rewarded by being the first in the queue.
"My favourite characters ar the Daleks," said George, who passed the time by carefully constructing a Dalek mask out of a white person paper udder and a straw. His elder sister, Katie, shyly confessed to being peculiarly enamoured of the Doctor himself, currently played by David Tennant. "Katie was up sooner than all of us straightening her hair," revealed her mother.
The concert, hosted by the actress Freema Agyeman, who plays one of the Doctor's sidekicks, Martha Jones, was part of the drive to make the yearbook Proms season more inclusive. Combining popular pieces including parts of Holst's Planets Suite and Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries with dozens from the TV serial publication, the 1,400-strong audience gasped when a legion of aliens and frightful creatures marched into the hall through the crowds. The announcement at the start of the concert forbidding photography was shortly forgotten. Hosting a concert using the popular appeal of such a mainstream programme has left the BBC open to accusations of dumbing down, a charge vehemently denied by festival director and BBC Radio 3 controller Roger Wright.
Speaking shortly before yesterday's show up he aforesaid: "I remember once people saw what was in the syllabus, they backed down. It's hard to talk about dumbing down when we're hosting a concert for families that include pieces by Holst, Wagner and Prokofiev."
The charges held little sway with the crowd either. "I think it's an absurd notion," aforesaid Sarah Carley, a music teacher from Kent. "You've got to make greco-Roman music accessible, and it has to be interesting for children."
The Doctor himself missed the prom, so a especially filmed 10-minute video had to do. David Tennant was unable to attend in individual because he is currently playing Hamlet for the RSC in Stratford. Speaking from a giant idiot box screen to the crowds, the time-travelling Doctor boasted: "I was at the first Proms in 1895. Played the tuba, I was splendid."
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