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The Proms has been going on for so many years, and is such a part of British cultural life, you sometimes forget what a revolutionary event it is – an enormous annual undertaking built upon highly democratic principles.

Don't know much about the Proms? Enjoy these facts and tales from across the festival's history, and take note of how cheap and easy it is to attend...

The Proms was founded in 1895 by impresario , who decided to plug a hole in the culturally fallow summer months by experimenting with a revolutionary kind of concert format, in which the seats in the stalls – traditionally the priciest – would be removed and a promenade created in their place.

Standing tickets to watch music from the promenade, Newman declared, would be the cheapest, meaning those who paid the least would be closest to the orchestra. "And with this one act," writes Paul Kildea in The Proms: A New History, "the accepted formality and regimentation of presenting serious music was turned on its head ... the Proms is historically the most subversive undertaking in British art music."

is still the cheapest way to go to the festival, and you don't need to book in advance. Around 1,000 standing places are available online daily from 10.30am for just £8 (including fees), regardless of whether the seated tickets have all been sold.

Standing tickets are either for the Arena or the Gallery, and you don't need to stand in the Gallery. You can sit on the floor, or lie down, as plenty of people do. You're welcome to lie down in the Arena too, but there usually isn't enough space.

Some Prommers will try to cancel every appointment during the eight weeks of the season and go to as many concerts as they can. Like Bruce Tarlton, above, whom we spoke to outside the Royal Albert Hall in 2016.

"I've been living in Spain for 25 years – I'm a primary school teacher there," he said, "but I literally come back just for the Proms, for two months, every year. It's really unique in the world. You don't get this concentrated number of concerts anywhere: this diversity, these audiences, this quality.

"The first time I came was probably about 1980. I would have been about 15. Just heading here with some friends. I've no idea what we saw, but I can remember Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler's Fifth in 1987. That was just wonderful. I was hooked."

If the purpose of the Proms was to make classical music available to everyone, then it was necessary to ensure a relaxed atmosphere in the festival's original venue, off Regent Street in central London. The inaugural programme included a notice stating that, "NUMEROUS refreshment & smoking rooms will be found as follows...", before listing the four places in the hall where Prommers could nip out for a cheeky smoke and drink. You could smoke in almost every part of the Hall, too.

"Smoking permitted" became a standard line of copy on Proms advertising well into the 20th century, although smokers were "politely requested to refrain from striking matches during the performance".

If there's a single person who embodies the spirit of the Proms, it's Sir Henry Wood, who was recruited by Robert Newman to conduct the concerts. Wood remained in his post for nearly 50 years until 1944, the year of his death. Through his musical brilliance, his understanding of the British people and the sheer force of his personality, he was instrumental in the festival becoming a success.

As the Proms' maestro, he frequently came up with new arrangements of well-known pieces to suit the orchestra he was working with. Critics often complained, leading Wood in 1929 to play a joke on them. "I got very fed up with them, always finding fault with any arrangement or orchestrations that I made ... 'spoiling the original'," he said. So he passed off one of his orchestrations of a Bach piece as being the work of a Russian composer called Paul Klenovsky. The press, he continued, "fell into the trap and said the scoring was wonderful, Klenovsky had the real flair for true colour – and performance after performance was given and asked for."

It took five years for Wood to reveal the truth, after which the Times published a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Klenovsky.

It's an astonishing fact, but the Proms has never missed a year – not during war time, and not even, fully, during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown. "Determination to keep the concerts going prompted experiments with format and timing," writes Leanne Langley in The Proms: A New History, "from matinées in October 1915 (which failed) and earlier evening start times in 1916 to shortened intervals and much lighter, brief second halves containing only an overture, two or three English songs and a march."

That the Proms continued throughout the Second World War (although the 1939, 1940 and 1944 seasons were curtailed) is even more remarkable. Not only did Henry Wood have to seek private investment to fund the festival after the 麻豆社 temporarily withdrew its support, Queen's Hall was bombed and destroyed in 1941, resulting in a move to the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington – Proms HQ ever since (although plenty of events take place in other venues).

With the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 came a return of the need to improvise in order to keep the Proms going. The concerts as planned were scrapped and a new, two-week season was arranged – with socially distanced performers and no live audience, but broadcasts, as usual, on 麻豆社 Radio 3. With some lockdown restrictions still in place in 2021, a six-week season was planned with 52 concerts.

New music has always been at the front and centre of the Proms season. Some of music's most-loved pieces, like Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, were given their first UK outings at the Proms. And it's impossible to overstate how important the Proms has always been to giving UK composers an audience. Some 220 new British works were performed in the first 25 years of the festival, by composers whose names we now take for granted – Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax – and that tradition of introducing British compositional talent remains.

Some new works have famously caused confusion when first played at the Proms. "The Futuristic music was received with decorously suppressed laughter," the Daily Mail wrote about the world premiere of Five Orchestral Pieces by Arnold Schoenberg, pictured above, at . "A feeble attempt at applause gave rise to emphatic hissing." And equally notorious in Proms history was the premiere of Sir Harrison Birtwistle's Panic at the , which came complete with "an obsessed-looking saxophonist wandering around bellowing like a bull in a field of cattle", as reported. Birtwistle was amused. "I thought it was fun," he told biographer Fiona Maddocks.

The Proms has strived for greater diversity and a more equal gender balance in recent years.

Furthermore, as part of the initiative, created by the PRS Foundation, the Proms committed to a 50/50 gender split from 2022 onwards.

"The Proms audience is an amazing thing," conductor John Wilson told the Telegraph recently. "I can say that both as a performer and regular Proms-goer myself. It's an eclectic mix of young, old, classical aficionado and first-time concert-attender, not to mention those who happen upon the Promming queue and decide to give it a whirl. I wish every audience was as varied. The fact you can turn up on the day and pay just a few pounds to watch incredible musicians makes it very democratic."

Indeed, a special kind of relationship exists between the musicians and the audience at the Proms. "It's the ultimate showcase for great artistry and superb audiences ... the dream audience," said conductor Marin Alsop during her speech at the Last Night of the Proms 2013, but sometimes facial expressions can speak louder than words. Just have a look at these .