“You don’t have to say that!”A girl with rainbow feathers in her hair read Harry Potter aloud while a precocious boy slashed demons on a laptop computer. The sustenance of choice in the queue was a picnic from a Marks & Spencer bag. Barbara, 73, had been to every Prom season since 1947 except one, the year her husband died “I just love coming,” she said. “It is like meeting your family.” Members of the orchestra were smoking roll-ups in the sun a few feet away. “I get icy feelings all down my back when the big chorus gets going.”Way up in the gallery during the concert people lay on the marbled floor or sat cross-legged and barefoot as the music drifted up. A woman read with her back to a pillar and her recumbent partner appeared to be asleep but for his hands. One caressed her ankle, the other moved as though playing the piano way down on the stage below.It was hot and airless back down in the arena but the power of the orchestra and chorus was hugely impressive close up Afterwards Matthew the student was pale but elated.

But all three are more remarkable for missed opportunities than creative milestones.The same could be said of the performance. How much of this was down to the obvious froideur between the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their Chief Conductor, Leonard Slatkin, is hard to say. With a work-to-rule horn section in front of him, Slatkin’s gestures seemed less organic than ever.Only tonight, with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s performance of Tippett’s King Priam, will the serious music-making start.. Big players in the record industry are calling on the Government to force Radio 1 to play more British pop after the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) revealed the amount of airtime it devotes to UK singles is at an all-time low. And they specified that the lists should be used to promote “quality” bands such as Coldplay and Travis rather than “manufactured” acts.Mr O’Brien voiced his frustration in a letter to its controller, Andy Parfitt. In it, he says that its public service remit obliges it to “champion, and probably to discriminate in favour of, British talent”.Sharkey, speaking as a singer, said: “It’s not enough …

for someone to walk into Radio 1 with a fantastic record and get airplay. You have to be able to say you are supporting U2 on their next tour and your video has been on MTV.”. David Kelly went to his death fearing that he might be. Alastair Campbell and others in government are “99 per cent” convinced that he was. Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, named him in a letter to the BBC, and somebody leaked his name to the press

David Kelly went to his death fearing that he might be.

The official alleged that the draft prepared by British intelligence had been altered “to make it sexier”.Far from Iraq being armed with weapons that posed an immediate threat, Mr Gilligan’s source allegedly believed it was only “about 30 per cent likely” Iraq had a chemical weapons programme in the six months preceding the war.Mr Gilligan added some details of his meeting with the source in an article he wrote for The Mail on Sunday that weekend. And he fitted the description of a “civil servant from the non-secret part of the civil service” who met Mr Gilligan in a hotel in central London – the Thistle Hotel at Charing Cross. He also admitted that the suggestion of a 30 per cent likelihood that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction could have come from him.But Dr Kelly did not recall complaining about the railways, and had not known Mr Gilligan for very long. He also denied authorship of two other allegations in Mr Gilligan’s 29 May report.The Government’s September dossier contained the now-notorious claim that Iraq possessed weapons that could be deployed “within 45 minutes of an order to use them”.