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[/audioplayer]Have you managed to book tickets to the Viking exhibition at the British Museum yet? If you haven’t, my advice is: don’t bother. I know what the critics have been saying: that it’s an unmissable treat. But it’s only an unmissable treat if you visit under the privileged conditions of a previewing journalist. Go as an ordinary punter on the other hand — as the Delingpole family discovered to their cost last week — and you’ll find it about as much fun as being pillaged, raped and having your ribcage torn open to form a ‘spread eagle’.
Well, maybe not quite that bad. But definitely bad enough to make you want to queue up and demand a refund.
Normally when I go and complain about this sort of thing — which does give me great pleasure, I must say — my kids go into paroxysms of embarrassment and beg me not to do it. On this occasion, however, they too felt the disappointment so keenly that they were actually egging me on.
We had, after all, come all the way up from the sticks for our special day of culture in Town. And having missed the Pompeii one, we were really rather looking forward to catching up with the latest blockbuster. So we arrived bang on time to catch our 3.10 p.m. entry slot. Only to find ourselves — Hwaet! — in a room so rammed with gawpers that it was scarcely possible to move, let alone get within viewing distance of the display cases.
Now I’ve been to must-see blockbuster shows before, of course — at the Royal Academy, at the National Gallery and so on. You accept a certain crowding as part of the deal: the organisers naturally want these events to be seen by as wide an audience as possible — and, probably, if it were more exclusive it would be twice as expensive.
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