Slap! Bang!

Until last night I'd never been inside the Albert Hall.

My first thought was “bad CGI” - it's such a huge place inside, oval and somehow wrong to the eye. The Dr took great delight in pointing out the madder Victorian bits: the huge dome, the various baffles and barrage balloons that mend the acoustics, the plinths of esteemed Victorians and Edwardians dotted about the place.

We were there to see Prom 25: Wagenaar's overture to Cyrano de Bergerac, Dvořák's Symphony No.6 in D major and – the bit the Dr bought the tickets for - Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major, featuring an extraordinary performance by Julia Fischer on violin, twirling and twisting about like a dervish as she did the more fiddly bits.

Blimey, it was good. Bumped into a similarly awe-struck Liadnan after, and then went and had pancakes for tea.

Oh, and before all that we found our way into the Britten Theatre for part of the Proms Literary Festival. My mate Matthew Sweet was discussing Victorian music hall with critic John Sutherland and the actor Michael Kilgarriff. Kilgarriff had the audience singing along to two old music hall numbers, and you can hear our paltry efforts on Night Waves on Radio 3 on Thursday.

(Doctor Who fans will be pleased to note that the Giant Robot / Cyber-Controller spoke of working alongside Arc of Infinity's President Borusa. We heard a hissy recording of Leonard Sachs introducing variety acts with some alarmingly alliterative eloquence. And I'd thought Matthew, in his introduction, was being Henry Gordon Jago.)