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The new Doctor Who exhibit at
Blackpool |
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The new Doctor Who exhibit at
Blackpool |
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| Synopsis: The Doctor Who exhibit at Blackpool features a variety of costumes and props from the show. |
Tiddly-Om-Pom-Pom by Andrew Wixon 3/5/04
One of Dr Who's more charming attributes is the way in which it can sneak up on you, often appearing unexpectedly in the weirdest of contexts - whether that be a fantastically rare book appearing in a junk shop, the Daleks advertising chocolate wafer biscuits, or an interview to promote a new play featuring Chris E turning into a second-degree grilling on how he plans to play the part. And it seems equally odd for an exhibition devoted to the show to make its home on Blackpool promenade - a town well-known for fresh air and fun, fair enough, but also these days notorious as a sleazy dump crying out for urban renewal (or failing that, a drastic rise in the level of the Irish sea). I should know, it's as near-as-dammit my home town.
But I have fond memories of the old, subterranean exhibition that ran from 1974 to 1986. Just as with the return of the show, the revival of the exhibition couldn't help but seem like the world returning to an earlier state of grace. So I conned my sister and brother-in-law into going into Blackpool to check it out, on the principle that they could give me a perspective on how the show appears to someone whose knowledge of the show is limited (i.e. Sue) or non-existent (i.e. Mike).
Well, anyway, forging our way through the forty-seven stag and hen party groups thronging the prom, it quickly became apparent that the 'artist's impression' in the current DWM is still very much that: no giant silver Pertwee logo visible for miles out to sea, just a half-erased picture of a fairly crap volcano. Sue pointed out that the fairly crap volcano effects on display in many a story made this a reasonable (if subtle) way of advertising the presence of Dr Who, but I was not convinced. The only other thing distinguishing the site was a notable thinning in the crowd in front of it. Not the best of omens.
On into the foyer/gift shop, with a rather nice selection of Targets, deleted videos, and other rare items of merchandise (the FASA role-playing game, anyone?). You don't have to pay the admission fee to shop there, but they don't take credit cards either (at the time of writing) so take chequebooks or a wad of cash if you're planning on splurging. On the other hand there is at least as much merchandise for Trek and Star Wars and The X Files as there is for our show, which will probably upset the purists. To say nothing of what a copy of The Evil Dead is doing on the video rack...
The exhibition itself is of a rather curious design, in that one proceeds along a winding and dimly-lit corridor past glass cabinets plugging DWAS, current merchandise, and other things (it's a bit hard to tell what some of these are as some of the cabinets weren't actually plugged in), as well as a mock-up of a sixties living room with (I think) An Unearthly Child showing on the TV. The corridor leads into that staple of any Dr Who-related installation, the mocked-up TARDIS console room. From here you rattle round corridors and a big costume gallery, arriving back in the TARDIS and going back down the entrance corridor again to get out the way you came in.
On first seeing the console room, the suspicions of Sue and myself were roused as this looks the absolute dead spit of the one from the old exhibition, right down to the exhibits in the walls: yeti, Ice Warriors, and so on. The cards giving information on the costumes were a bit dismaying - one described the alien race known as "the Silurian's" (complete with rogue apostrophe) who apparently made their second outing when 'Peter Davidson' was the Doctor.
This leads me on to one of the main problems with the site: rotten labelling. The majority of exhibits have no documentation at all describing what they are or when they appeared. Now I didn't have a problem with this, most of the time (even so there was a lot of smaller stuff I simply couldn't place), but Sue was baffled by a lot of it and my completely-non-Who-literate brother-in-law simply hadn't got a clue.
This ties in with another flaw we decided the exhibition suffered from - lack of forethought in the layout. The cases and galleries aren't laid out chronologically or thematically, so there's no sense of the history of the show or the way it developed. One goes straight from a Gundan to K9 to K1 to Morbius. The end result is that rather than being an actual exhibition about the series, with all the informativeness and insight that suggests, this is really not much more than a display of unlabelled costumes.
And some of those aren't in very good nick - it is almost axiomatic that Dr Who monsters look better on film than they do on VT, and better on VT than they do in the 'flesh' - particularly when 17 years of rough handling has made them drop to bits! The robot cleaner from Paradise Towers is in a particularly bad state, as is the android from The Visitation (though it occurs to me that both these exhibits might be survivors of the Llangolen fire all those years ago, which would explain the state they're in). But - to me at least - just seeing them up close was interesting enough to justify the entrance fee. Even if the Pipe People appear taller the Garm for some reason. (Bessie's there too.)
I wish I could say nicer things about the new exhibition, but it really does just seem to be a half-arsed attempt to make money out of filling up some space on-site using bits from old exhibitions. Virtually none of this seems to be new - the dead giveaway being a loop tape of the Doctors and their regenerations which lists Sylvester McCoy's tenure as being from 1987 to the present day! (There's no mention of the revival and the McGann years are covered by about two photos and a display case.) The 'interactivity' the publicity goes on about does indeed include a lot of buttons to press. They are light switches. (I'm not making this up!) A few others make electronic farty noises or start sound clips or make the exhibits wobble alarmingly, but these are not that common.
There's the core here of a really nice little exhibition about the history and development of Dr Who, but it would need a serious reorganisation and a lot of labelling adding in order for it to work as that. I pretty much enjoyed it (even if a large chunk of this was due to finding six stories for sale in the gift shop I didn't actually own), but Sue was quite indifferent, and Mike's favourite bit was a 'roll a coin down the Black Hole' thing with no real DW relevence that had been stuck next to Bessie for no apparent reason. But looking on the bright side, he has learned that the Doctor regenerates - he wasn't previously aware the change of lead actor got an on-screen explanation.
(Actually, I think he found the whole experience a bit disturbing as his wife began to display an alarmingly encyclopaedic and hitherto-unsuspected knowledge of Doctor Who: 'Oh, look, it's a Vervoid! And here are some Cybermen. They don't like gold, so if they come at you rub your wedding ring against that bit there...' Come to think of it I think Sue was a bit worried by this too - she blamed growing up around me. I just felt a strong sense of personal triumph.)
When I said I wanted the Blackpool exhibition reopening, I didn't mean it to be taken quite so literally. As what's-his-name said about something else entirely, this is worth seeing - but not worth the effort of actually going to see.