The first night of the Proms opened with the National Anthem: 'God Save the Queen' - Queen Victoria that is, and the date was August 10 1895. That was the very, very first night of the Proms, ever - and the programme seems rather a bitty compilation of music by today's standards. Here it is in the newly available Proms Archive, which contains programmes of all 7168 Proms since then:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/archive/search/event.shtml?id=1&tab=search&sub_tab=season

As Tom Service writes, "There's a serious side to the archive. It's a historical cross-section of how tastes have changed over more than a century of Proms-going, and how concert formats have transformed out of all recognition from what they were at the end of the 19th century."

The man behind the original Proms idea, Robert Newman, who appointed Henry Wood to conduct the Proms, had a mission: "I am going to run nightly concerts," he promised himself and the world, "and train the public by easy stages - popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music."

I wonder how he would approach the task now.