The 2008 season ran from 18 July to 13 September 2008. The BBC released details of the season slightly earlier than usual, on 9 April 2008. Composers whose anniversaries were marked include:
- Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2008 being 50 years since his death
- Elliott Carter and Olivier Messiaen, each in his centenary year
- Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, to mark the centenary of his death
- Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose 80th birthday would have fallen during the season (he died on 5 December 2007).
The celebration of Stockhausen was centred on two large-scale concerts on 2 August 2008, and complementing Vaughan-Williams's interest in folk music, the first Sunday was given over to a celebration of various aspects of British folk, including free events in Kensington Gardens and the Albert Hall, and ending with the first-ever céilidh in the Albert Hall itself.
Other changes included additional pre-Prom talks and events. For the first time, there was a related talk or event before every Prom, held in the Royal College of Music. The popular family-oriented Prom this year became the Doctor Who Prom, (in place of the Blue Peter Prom of recent years). The Doctor Who Prom included a mini-episode of Doctor Who, "Music of the Spheres".
Just over a month before the announcement, Margaret Hodge, a Minister of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport suggested "that the Proms was one of several big cultural events that many people did not feel comfortable attending" and advocated an increase in multicultural works and an effort to broaden the audience. Her comments received wide criticism in the musical world and media as being a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Proms, with the Prime Minister even distancing himself from her remarks.
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