PlayerCom debuts at the Proms

Interactive producer Graeme Kay helped usher in player commentaries at the First Night of the Proms. Here's what happened ...

When we introduced MaestroCam as a Red Button service on digital platforms during the Proms last year, some sceptics asked, why on earth would you want to have your viewing and listening compromised by someone wittering on during the music?

Well, those 'someones' were three distinguished conductors and teachers - Matthew Rowe, Peter Stark and Jason Lai, who'd come to national attention as the people who, respectively, had mentored Katie Derham, Peter Snow and the eventual winner, Sue Perkins, in BBC 2's televised conducting show, Maestro. And they didn't, of course, witter. I co-produced the first of these experimental Red Button services: and my experience was that hearing Matthew Rowe quietly commentating on the late Sir Charles Mackerras's interpretation of Holst's The Planets brought me whole new levels of interest and understanding of the intricacies of the scoring, and the technical challenges of bringing out an interpretation in music which I thought I knew fairly well. (You can still see the programme by clicking this link.)

MaestroCam wasn't for everyone, of course, but it seemed to us to be exactly the sort of optional service which many music-lovers might appreciate if offered such an extension of choice to their experience of the concert. From a production point of view, it's exactly the kind of service which Red Button is designed to deliver, and which digital platforms make possible; it also costs very little. Choice is the key element - a few years ago, a highly sophisticated and much-appreciated project to produce in-vision programme notes, synchronised to the music, nearly foundered because a roll-out on BBC 1, where a Red Button option wasn't available, meant that viewers who didn't want the notes couldn't turn them off. One disgruntled viewer complained, not about the notes, but about the Prom - it was an unwelcome instrusion into his viewing of a vastly over-running golf game.

Anyway, with the technology sorted, there was nothing to stop us going ahead with the MaestroCam experiment, to see if it would work, and, of course, to gauge public response. The overwhelmingly positive feedback we received vindicated our decision, with many viewers writing or emailing to say how much they'd enjoyed the MaestroCam commentaries. This year we've taken another step forward and added a new service - PlayerCom.

So, last Friday afternoon, in not much more than a cubby-hole in Television Centre, we greeted three distinguished musicians who had responded to a call to commentate on the First Night of the Proms - Mahler 8, the 'Symphony of a Thousand' (actually 650 in our case). Nicole Wilson is a violinist with the English National Opera orchestra; Alistair Mackie plays trumpet in the Philharmonia; and Ron Corp is a conductor with extensive experience of training children's choirs. The trio had attended the final orchestral and general rehearsals in the Royal Albert Hall, and were now together to rehearse their commentary in front of a DVD recording of the general...

On the face of it, you might ask, how can you 'rehearse' spontaneity? The answer is that, of course, you can't: but the rehearsal enabled us to check all the engineering aspects (even something as simple as sound levels has to be got right in advance); it was an opportunity for our three professional colleagues to become totally at ease with each other; and for my Red Button lead producer colleague Rhonagh O'Donnell and I to check that we had the right balance of content in commentaries which were, of course, unscripted.

When it came to the concert, the hours of preparation, in my view, paid off handsomely: Mahler 8 is a very complex work and Mahler's music is notoriously hard to bring off: even seasoned listeners profess to having problems in coming to terms with Mahler; but with my punters' ears on, I thought that the way our experts navigated us through the score, pointing out the challenges to the orchestral players, singers and conductor, and passing the baton, as it were, seamlessly between each other, was revelatory. As well as being a professional musician, Ron is also an ordained priest, and having him on hand to guide us through the metaphysics of the piece (not least the parade of opaque characters who emerge from Goethe's text to appear in Part Two) brought an extra dimension of experience to the commentary. Orchestral players are as much up for a laugh as the rest of us and Nicole has an infectious sense of humour - we were happy for this to come through, even in a solemn work such as Mahler 8, as the three commentators sparked off each other; it helped generate the atmosphere we'd been looking for - an easy, relaxed conversation about the music in which three expert practitioners acted as trusted guides and shared their knowledge with the audience.