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| Talk,
Graham Bower,
14 January 1999 | |
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The dome has given a lot of people like me a great deal of pleasure, but not because we've visited it and had a great time.
No, people like me love the dome because we're tirelessly cynical and we love nothing more than to be proved right. But our pleasure has abated of late as the hoards descended on the dome for the school holidays demonstrating that the masses are maybe not as averse to a day out at the dome and we had all assumed.
Indeed, the turnstile sensation of last week was enough to prompt many fainter hearted journos to eat humble pie and concede that maybe they had got it wrong about the dome afterall. Meanwhile, in parliament, culture minister Chris Smith attacked the media and the "chattering classes" for being so negative.
Well forgive us for chattering, but when we’re given something so entertaining to chatter about, the temptation to chatter is irresistible. It’s not so much that the dome was a bad idea, per say, but rather that the execution was so poor. Who would ever have thought that the best way to create a major new visitor attraction in the UK would be to put a bunch of government ministers in charge of the project. They succeeded in spending £750 million on a project which had not even established a clear objective. I’m still not sure if the dome is intended to be educational or entertaining, and evidently from its content, the developers weren’t either.
The marketing of the dome illustrates its fundamental lack of direction, focussing on images of the building itself, because the design of the inside is so pedestrian, the proposition is "One extraordinary day." They can’t go into any more detail than that, because there really is nothing more to say. And its true of course – the transport is so bad that it’ll take you a day to get there and back, and the dome itself is so pitiful, "extraordinary" applies in the sense of extraordinarily bad.
So, if the dome sucks so badly, why are so many people going there? Well surely that’s endemic of a national character trait – Brits love to more. How those families, packed into the worlds largest tent must have relished the opportunity to scorn the powers that be for their ineptitude, and mock the corny "edutainment" exhibits with Boots and McDonalds branding. Indeed, even I was tempted to go along when I heard all the press coverage about how bad the dome was.
Maybe the government got it right after all. What better present could Tony Blair give us Brits to celebrate the millennium with than a great big, badly conceived eyesore to moan about.
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