TRASHFUTURE - A Dome That Sucked, Part 1

Episode Date: January 4, 2022

This week, we have the full cast of TF together to review the history of the Millennium Dome, a New Labour attempt to create a modern exposition of Britain. It definitely became an exhibition of how weird the inner circle of Blair’s Labour was, but it’s largely regarded as a failure–and we learn about how it transformed a chunk of Greenwich from the Goop Zone into the Empty Luxury Flat Zone. Part 2 of this episode is available now on the Patreon—get it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/60698903 If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

A special address from Trashutra Rationality Correspondent, Brendan O'Neill. This week, the chattering classes of this once great nation have yet again been all of a flutter about what, you ask, the ever-increasing war on Christmas, the relentless drive to ruin smoking. No, dear reader, the tahini Trotskyites of Essex Road, N1, are furious about former Prime Minister Tony Blair being given a knighthood in the New Year's Honours List. These Camembert communists would have you believe that the traditional knighthood afforded to former Prime Ministers shouldn't be given to Blair simply because he is a white man

and also due to the controversies surrounding his time in office. But if we were to strip the knighthoods of every white male politician we disagree with, who would be next? Sir Winston Churchill? Sir Oswald Mosley? The list goes on. Indeed, these petty four posadists of Zone 2 seem hell-bent on effectively making it illegal to be a politician.

Are we to assume that in their twisted world view, a UK Prime Minister would never be allowed to invade Iraq again? We may debate the merits of the 2003 war and its outcomes all we like, but just because there weren't WMDs in Iraq doesn't mean there couldn't have been. Was Tony Blair supposed to possess the powers of clairvoyance? By setting this precedent, what do we expect the response of a British government to be to the emergence of, say, God forbid, a Nazi Iraq? Where would their woke compass point them then?

It is unfortunate for Tony Blair, however, that he is far from innocent. These halloumi-hosherists and angioflake anarchists didn't emerge in a vacuum. Indeed, they were forged in the flames of Blair's own woke agenda. In the 70s and 80s, the left were defined by the horny-handed miners and factory workers of the trade unions, but since 1997 the only horny-handed leftist is to be found in his polycule. Blair's dismantling of Britain's manufacturing apparatus and propagandising of the youth via the hippie-drivel they were read at Sure Start centres from leftist dire tribes such

as Pipgoe's strawberry-picking and Billy Blue Hat have ironically created the conditions for his own demise. The Sanseh Sandinistas he forged will not stop until our nation's honours fit their perverse diversity requirements. I do not know, dear reader, how many honours will, in years to come, be given out by the Queen with a haired dyed blue to assorted vegans, anarchists and so-called academics, but I fear the number may be close to 1,984. I don't know how you keep coming up with these alliterations.

I don't know how he does it. I don't know. Hello, hello, hello, hello. It is the first episode of TF this year and we've decided to make it one of some impulse. Monumentality. Yes. We've decided to do a good episode as a joke.

Yeah. That's right. We're only doing it as a bit, so I don't think we're going to be doing this regularly. No, I hope you all had a good Christmas in New Year's, but we are back. Don't write in. Yes, if you had a good Christmas in New Year's, share that information with the people close to you, not us. Keep that shit to yourself.

No, it's all of us. It is Riley, Alice, Nate, Usain and Milo, and we are going to be talking about something that I think, something that I've been thinking about for a while, ever since I gave the London place of residence in my brains, which is great monumental projects done by British political projects that feel like they have to do and say something written in the physical world, but where they sort of don't have anything to do or say. And so it just ends up being strange. So with all that in mind, I want to open the quote from one Anthony Blair.

The eyes of the world will be on Greenwich as the clocks strike midnight on December 31st, 1999, where once there was derelict land, people will see the most spectacular celebration anywhere in the world to mark the millennium. I urge people to support this project because I believe it's good for Britain. It's a display of confidence in the creativity and talents of our people and a chance for all to shape our future and begin the 21st century, the sense of purpose, hope and unity. It will be a time for the nation to come together to be excited, entertained, moved and uplifted. Visitors from all over the world will have the time of their lives.

Yes, we are all going to come together thanks to a dome. The big dome. Everyone in Britain loves dome. Dome got us coming together as a nation. Today, he concludes, Britain need not settle for second best. And no, we did not settle for second best with the dome. I don't think we had to worry about that. If only, if only we were anywhere near second best.

Today, Britain does not have to risk achieving second best. That's right. In this dome, we have a creation that I believe will truly be a beacon to the world. That's right. It's the Millennium Dome two-part spectacular to open up 2022. Yeah. So it's the dome. It's the dome.

You remember the Millennium Dome? Oh, I remember the Millennium Dome. I've only ever heard like vague references to it, but I never really appreciated that it was ever a thing anyone cared about. Well, the Millennium Dome is only where Han Solo lives. So jot that down. We are probably going to talk about this some more later on, but in the kind of like Southeast suburbs,

the Millennium Dome was the biggest thing. And I remember that very, very significantly. It was like, yeah, it was the biggest thing in terms of like, it was geographically the biggest thing that like existed around there. You have Hussain and I as your Southeast London correspondence to tell you, there was fuck all else going on in Bromley during like the Millennium. Before that, you only had Chiselhurst Caves in the glades. That's right.

I have so many stories about Chiselhurst Caves. However, I think every primary school in that area did one field trip, at least to the Millennium Dome. So for those of you who don't know, the Millennium Dome, especially Americans, Millennium Dome is, now it's the O2 Center, it's a big concert venue, but it was where Britain had its gigantic celebration of the Millennium. And in form, crucially, it's a big circus tent.

So if you want to know where it is, look up the O2 Arena in Greenwich and you'll see that. Or watch The World Is Not Enough, the James Bond film. Yeah, you can see Pierce Brosnan skid down the side of it. It's in the news now, right? Because new sort of new labor archival documents were released and Tony Blair said, quote, I'm worried about the lack of the wow factor in the plans for the Millennium Dome,

which he claimed to be a triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness and excellence over mediocrity. This will become an unusual statement as we get in. Yeah, because he sees the actual plans, which are for a big silver tent and goes, these look shit. So Charlie Falconer, who is in charge of the dome, the minister for the dome, as he was called.

Yeah, that's right. He said, we need at least 10 wows. Oh, yeah. Because labor centers have been partridge forever. It was, well, that's... Gentlemen can allow a wow gap to embed. You know, what's funny is I was just thinking about the big gimmicky thing in the early 80s was they were going to use like

really weird proprietary technology to make a modern dome staybook. And this is like the late 90s version of that. Instead of a new dome staybook, they're just building a dome. And they're getting just as excited. And I feel like its historical impact is about as insignificant as that. This is a very funny side note, but they made this massive huge collection of stuff, like of contemporary Britain in the early 80s,

but it all used proprietary tech and now no one can read it. Like it's not, you can't use computers to read it anymore because like, yeah, so I do wonder deep down if Britain just has this recursive need to involve a dome in its life. And this was just one manifestation of that. Britain does have a recursive need to try to justify its own existence and project to its people and everyone else around the world. Yeah, a recursive need for dome.

So Falconer wrote that we need at least 10 wows. All of our exhibitions are too samey and worthy. Blair annotated the note, this is indeed very worrying. Isn't the Sex Palace in Brighton also a dome? It is a pavilion technically. It has domes. Yeah, but it has multiple domes rather than being a single dome. So once again, that's that recursive pattern in British history.

A dome emerges. Time is a flat dome. Yeah, George IV built himself a special fat boy treat mosque. That's right. The dome was a controversial scheme. Falconer wrote to Blair, we have a dome and now we must all work to make it a success. Listen, you go to Millennium with the dome that you have,

not the dome you wish you had. The dome's been built. The only question is, what are we filling the dome with? Okay, let's just be clear on that. So, and then the newly released memos go on to say that Alistair Campbell, who was a member of the Domas board said that the Millennium project should be completely refashioned from the ground up. The site extended, for example, to accommodate a hospital,

businesses, charities, private residences, and the whole thing should be named the Princess Diana Center. Awesome, awesome. Cool. We used to build things in this country. Brackets, the Princess Diana Memorial Center. The Princess Diana Necropolis. Yeah, that would be cool.

It should make it to a massive mausoleum for Princess Diana. Separately, there should be a special track where you can drunk drive a Mercedes in the Millennium dome. That would have been a better activity than any of the ones they came up with. But I think it goes to one of the things that just is indicated with some of these people, like Campbell and Faulkner and Blair and John Prescott separately,

and Mandelson plays huge in this, is they all sort of people whose brains were broken by marketing and who are unable to extricate themselves from trying to get the answers they want out of a focus group. And you'll see this come up again and again and again and again. Well, luckily this didn't lead to any institutional problems in the labor class. Never, never, never. Finally, before we go off this bit,

one of Blair's aides did say that Diana's death could give us a semi-plausible excuse to bail out of doing the dome. Wow, awesome. A nation in its sorrow cancels its dome. Well, I mean, if you want a quick vignette of just how much Princess Diana is like a fucking landmark in the minds of the British public, recently my mother and I dug out some old camcorder videos

that I managed to get working. There's a video of me on the beach in Devon somewhere in 1997 and my mom's going like, that whole day when we went there, that must have been, she's like, that's the day Princess Diana died. That's what that is. This family vignette. Here's a selection of the dramatist persona.

Some of the people that we're going to be talking about, there's John Major and Michael Heseltine who actually came up with the project. Blair Brown hated it. All of the like baroque inspiration you would expect from John Major. Well, that's exact. We'll get into sort of what John Major wanted it to be. But Blair who loved it,

because it was his thesis statement about what new labor would be, Brown who hated it because he thought it was like extravagant and unnecessary. Mandelson, the first minister of the dome, who is just revealing himself to just be a fucking moron throughout this entire process. A guy who like, throughout this whole process, he's again behaving like someone who wants to imitate the thick of it before it was made.

It was very interesting. John Prescott who nearly had his career derailed by some of the after effects. Charlie Faulkner, the minister of the dome after Mandelson. Now the chairman of a landlord organization. Jenny Page, the head of the new millennium development Corp and former head of English Heritage. And then her replacement, Pierre-Yves Gibo, Gibo rather, the head of the...

I remember P.Y. Gibo. He was absolutely like a figure of some nose in British public consciousness, which is an insane thing to think about. He was the former head of French ice hockey and then an executive at Euro Disney. And was made at the head of the company when Page was sacked for not selling... French ice hockey. Correct. Sorry, we just let that one go.

No, he was always seen zipping around the dome on like a little scooter. Yes, I remember this. He was just absolutely a prime guy. Had podcasts existed at the time, we would have lasered it. He would have been our guy on the dome. He was like a mad hand cockish figure. Absolutely. Richard Rogers, the architect of the building itself and recent corpse.

Roger. Philip Anschutz and Richard Borm who were two politically connected billionaires. Tessa Jowell, the secretary of state for DCMS, who was going to basically try to legalize gambling. Detective Sergeant Shatford, who investigated a sting. Diamondized. DC Shufflesworth. And then the entire cast of Blue Peter, who put a bunch of 1999 shit in a time capsule that accidentally got dug up in 2017 instead of 2100.

Wait, was that fucking Richard? What's his face? Yeah, absolutely. A man fired from Blue Peter from doing cocaine. You stashed a little that in the time capsule, but that was cool. I want to ask Milo Hussain and Alice for your anecdomes, your memories of dome. My anecdomes, my memories of dome. The thing I remember about the dome is going to it with my parents because like they thought it would be some sort of historic event.

Seeing some Cirque du Soleil bullshit with like guys on wires from the roof of the dome. And the only other thing that I remember is the bodies. Yes, yes. Yeah. Which was the premise of this was that you would walk around inside a big human body and look at how it works. Yeah. So basically like the disgusting magic school bus. Yeah, exactly.

Or like the movie Inner Space. Everyone gets to be equated for a day in the dome. Yeah, this is... Yeah, as Huey Long said, every man are quite... Yeah, this is... It was a vision of Britain that accepted and embraced Vaugh. Something that sadly, the modern Labour Party refuses to both acknowledge and to endorse. And I think that's really sad.

I think it actually was Vaugh. It was, but yeah. It was one way and you exited via the mouth and you exited via the anus. So I remember like, I remember I went on a school trip that like everyone in South East London or like in the suburbs of South East London at the time. And a bunch of us were really scared to like go inside the mouth because it was just like... I know it kind of reminded me a bit of like, you know, Attack on Titan and like the monster, like the kind of like big... I've only watched a few episodes. Yeah, a little bit.

But the idea that like they kind of, they have this, these big gaping mouths that don't necessarily consume you, but you kind of end up entering it. Yeah. That was kind of what that human body... Yeah. And everything was like made out of this like weird foam sort of effect. So it was like spongy, but not wet. One thing I remember, which I thought was like a fever dream, but actually turns out to be real, was that there was like a giant naked boy in the dome. So I thought it was fake, but I think it might be real.

Giant naked boy. The ones who walk away from dome. And I'm going to like post a picture into the chat just in case like you remember it. It's like the second picture. Well, Hussain's doing that. Why is there a giant boy? There's a giant boy. There's a giant naked boy in the dome.

Why? He's wearing... He's wearing like tan shorts. He's wearing... Basically naked boy. Oh yeah. Yeah. The body thing.

Yeah. The body thing was also my abiding memory of it. And I distinctly remember that in the rectum part of the body, there was a new labor spad pointing at the prostate and telling everyone that that was the male G spot. And that one day we would all get pegged too. That's why the dome got shut down because there were too many harsh truths being spoken. Entering the body zone from the rectum. Genuinely, my only other memories of the Millennium Dome are that they were playing Madonna everywhere and that I got a pencil sharpener. That's...

I have another memory of the dome, which is that they screened a special spin-off time-traveling Blackadder episode in it. This is right. It is a showcase of new labor trying to make something that was both quintessentially British, but that could appeal to sort of any person they could possibly imagine while making their thesis statement about like the uplifting of the spirit of man, essentially. So... Sure. It was also just a weird tent that no one had any idea how to fill. And so what was placed in it was just a selection of people's weird ideas. What I was going to say was that it remarkably felt really empty even at the time.

And I remember feeling this when we had to kind of sit down on the floor for this weird Cirque du Soleil thing, which none of us understood what was going on. Some of the performers were also really bad, and I remember there was one that fell off one of the trapezes or whatever. And it fell off fairly gracefully. I mean, all things considered, but it was just like, oh, that was a weird... I don't think that should have happened. But what I was going to say in addition to that is if you go to the O2 now, and the O2 is like near-ish my house, so I go there every so often, it's also really, really empty. There's so much kind of just open space that isn't really doing very much. So to me, it's kind of just like, oh, you've just built this structure in which regardless of what you do with it, it's always just going to feel kind of...

It's going to feel like a weird strip more. Yeah. Tony Blair, how can we fill this giant dome and a guy who looks a bit sinister is like, well, I have this massive statue of a child wearing a keynotes. Look upon my works, you mighty. One last thing, which is that like, I remember what really struck me about it as a child was that they spent years building this thing, and then it was only open for like a few months. We had 120 days of so dome. Well, it just looks... I feel like we should share that link that very early, you know, year 2000 internet link that Hussein found, because the photos really illustrate how it looks like if they decided to get... Discount Jeff Koons art in like a temporary airport terminal that was just built for some reason and called the dome.

Like it looks very impermanent and shoddy. That's the best way I could describe it. It's just, it's so weird that this was meant to be some kind of epical installation. Like it just kind of looks like shit. And I mean, all right, I'm hard on Britain. I always talk about how basically everything looks like shit here, but like this, this is a particularly advanced level of shittiness. So here's how it all came around, right? The East Greenwich Peninsula had this gas works on it that operated for about a century from 1889 to 1895.

And then the contaminated land was like toxic sludge and you couldn't really go on it. Well, that was all like industrial, like dockland sort of area then, right? And so John Major's government has this idea to sort of extend some older programs and say we're going to make a development corporation here. We're going to clean up the sludge and we're going to have something that will usher in the 21st century. Drain the sludge. Yeah, because it's like an embarrassment to have London, which is, as we've mentioned before, the only city in the country. Just have one third of it be like, oh, that's the Goop Zone. It's fine for other cities to have a Goop Zone, but we can't let London.

That's why the Goop Zone lives. And so the Committee of MPs then approves the plans with the ambition specifically to recreate the 1951 and 1851 exhibitions that were going to let in their time sort of showed Britain that here's what it is that we're doing right now. Introducing these new modes of living, whether it was the 1851 introducing the kind of here are the plunders of our empire and the splendors of our conquest. Or in 1951 being like, we have been proven victorious in the Second World War. Here are the wonders of our state-owned industries. Please don't become communists. Here is asbestos flooring. Enjoy. And so the Millennium exhibition is supposed to echo these things. It's supposed to be very big, but no one really knows why they're doing it.

They just feel like they should because there's a big round number. Also, this was like, this was a purely British mania. Like no one else did ship the Millennium as far as I recall. Like it wasn't some international phenomenon. Like it was just a sort of calendar order. It wasn't even the Millennium in Australia until about 2005. That's how little they cared. I think it's because there is this, the British state always feels like it needs to put on exhibitions of what it's doing.

But then you have the perfect postmodern stuff. I'll get into it. So Secretary of State Peter Brooks said of the plans for this whole Millennium fund, because it wasn't just the dome. It was also the London Eye and other projects. Which is so perfectly new labor. Like we have given London a circus tent and a ferris wheel. Yeah, exactly.

And you can look at the tent from the ferris wheel. Just systematically, yeah, applying my clown name. So I see the Millennium funds said Secretary of State Peter Brooks at the time as largely promoting projects which lie beyond the scope of an individual organization. Presidents, things of that nature. Presidents, including the Great Exhibition of 1851, which is a remarkable celebration of the greatness of the arts, manufacture, industry and commerce.

And then the Festival of Britain, which was a tonic to the nation after the Second World War. They left their architectural legacies. It was intended to be such as the Crystal Palace or the Royal Festival Hall. The fund now offers the scope for making real improvements to the face of the UK. So, for example, getting a little more into it, right? The Great Festival of Britain was, you know, remembered especially by people at the time as something of a success.

And specifically the success of Herbert Morrison, who was the grandfather of Peter Mandelson and the head of the scheme in the Atlee government. A man with a very buttery lineage. Yeah, we're just like into like a sort of ancestral flimflam. Peter Mandelson is just such a central plank of every big two-parter episode we ever do, because he just has his spindly little fingers in every single pie. So, displays go up all over the country in 1951.

It was sort of centered on Waterloo, but there was lots of things there. And it displayed actual new technology, stuff like, there were lots of stereoscopic films. That's right. Asbestos condoms, asbestos cocaine. Yeah, this robot can smoke a pint. And a lot of the films were sponsored by state-owned industries, such as the Petroleum Films Bureau,

sponsoring Air Parade in forward a century. Petroleum Films Bureau. Creating a shitload of YouTube stuff. Correct. Yeah, it's British Pathé, basically, yeah. At the time of the planning, the director general of the festival said, always before large-scale national exhibitions have been organized in trade sections, space was sold to firms to display their own wares in their own way. We were going to dispense with all that.

We were going to tell a consecutive story, not industry by industry, the story of the British people, there was no space to let. The theme of the exhibition was developed with sequences which correspond to certain activities of British life. For example, exploration and discovery, industry, transport, rural life, home and sport. I've just had a horrible realization. What the Millennium Dome was intended to be to the liberal centrist brain is what the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony actually did.

Which was, you know, our island story or whatever. But instead of doing that, because Danny Boyle hadn't been invented yet, what they got was a circus tent filled with a child, a giant child. So what happened was, like with... Is that like the... In this case, it was their first crack at doing the 2012 opening ceremony. They kind of thought they could do it themselves. I mean, imagine if the 2012 Olympics has opened with a bunch of people

wheeling out an enormous naked child. And that would have been better. It's just occurred to me, in fact, that essentially what New Labour did with the Millennium Dome is prove their entire thesis statement, which is that the government shouldn't be allowed to do anything. Like, they're basically like, oh, imagine if a private company had done this, it'd probably be better, eh? Well, we'll get to the parole of private companies.

So one of the main planners of the Dome project was a man called Michael Grade, who is now the Lord Grade of Yarmouth. And he's basically been... The Lord Grade of Yarnham, gotcha. He's basically been like a TV impresario sort of the whole time. He was on the planning committee. He said, and oddly enough, this is from an article... I did basically just lots of archival research for this.

This is from an article in 2003, written by of all people, Nick Cohen. Friend of the show. That's like three people in Britain. Yeah, and two of them are Peter Mandelson and the other one's Nick Cohen. In 1851 and 1951, the great and the good created the wonderful tableaus and then lifted the curtain and allowed the great unwashed to have a peep at how great their leaders were. So this is Michael Grade talking about his ambitions

and he's quoted by Nick Cohen. This show is different. Here is the people themselves who are the focus. It says, think about your own life. The people are in charge. They can make their own mistakes. They're not being told what to do, what to be, or how to act. What the dome says to them is, here you are, folks.

Here are your choices. You decide. The dome speaks. Choose your own adventure, Dime. It is a perfect postmodern exhibition of the greatness of Britain, which is whatever it is. It's a liminal space. Optimistically, well, you're on your own.

That's right. The thing is, it doesn't do to be nostalgic, but this is the perfect... This is before the spinners of the economic system we live under now. This is before they figured out how to sell it well. The logic of the postmodern, which is, well, there isn't anything right. We don't know anything. You don't know anything. So everything is just what everyone feels, and it's all just vibes,

which really comes through in the exhibitions. Yeah. Do you want to check out the boy? Yeah. You want to walk through a... How about the faith zone, where we say, many believe in God, and that's sort of just it. Young Osimandius, the big boy.

Yeah. So this is specifically the repudiation of modernity, this idea that there is a great project of some kind to be undertaken. Not to say again, the imperial project was not a good or laudatory project. No. It was like, instead of imposing this top-down vision on you, we're going to offer you no vision. Precisely.

So the civil service said, and this is what this is supposed to be, right? This weird amorphous, no vision, this idea, well, we'll build a giant structure, and I assume we can just fill it with sort of things that will appeal to people because we have our focus groups. And that's like, this almost shows like how focus groups are like the knowledge-gathering tool of post-modernity, which is just, well, anything anyone says is right, and we just want to reflect them back at themselves. Being the one grandpa Simpson type girl in the new labor Facebook group going,

there should be a giant boy. That's what the people want, a huge boy in Chino shorts. The civil service said, the overall purpose of all millennium activity is several full millennium activity. It says it is to re-energize the nation and to change perceptions, specifically to raise the self-esteem of the individual, to engender... Did they get this off a ball of links? What's going on?

I was going in the opposite direction. This is the new labor human instrumentality project. To engender a sense of pride in the wider community and to enhance the world's view of the nation itself. So it's also a bit of a foreign policy project, right? Which is, we are going to be the standard bearers of this thing that turned out to be total horse shit. Awesome.

Everybody else is going to be like, check them out. They've got a dome. They've got a dome. It's got a boy. It's got several McDonald's. Did it actually? Yeah, McDonald's was a huge sponsor of the whole thing. And so McDonald's...

They actually, one of the shows in the Millennium Dome was something called In Our Town, where people from various towns up and down the country, like high school kids, made little videos about what it was like living in their town and then it was all presented by McDonald's. Are they just interviewing the new labor people about this? So you're telling me for the Millennium what you've done

is you've built a big ferris wheel. Yeah. And you've built a massive circus tent. Yeah. And all the food is being provided by... Don't make me say it. He's providing all the food. He's a big clown.

All right, this is... But the thing is, right, what they're trying to do with just the expression of feeling, with the expression of some kind of a... With almost the... They're trying to empower people by just saying, oh, you're free to do and think whatever you want here in the dome is... But you can never leave.

Right? You know what I'm getting at, right? This idea that, oh, the dome is there to reflect you back at you. It's this kind of 1990s sort of vision of what empowerment means. It's one of the only places where you can really directly look at yourself through your anal cavity and realize that you are a free and autonomous individual

that doesn't need the state. You can investigate your own root chakra and this is like before New Labour authoritarianism really kicked in, right, after 9-11. And that's the thing that makes it so interesting to me is that before they became punished New Labour, right? This was their vision. This was what they wanted to offer people.

You mean say what you will, but you couldn't do 9-11 in the Millennium Dome? It got right through it. It bounced off us. We buried the entire left of the Labour Party in pursuit of a giant anus. Yeah, that's right. Getting an ASBO for gooning the ass of the giant body.

By 96, right, this was still a Tory project. I mean, all these announcements were made. It was a Labour project. But by 96, ministers have been unable to raise private capital and so they needed to get sponsorship from the Lottery Fund, which was again created by John... Which was sort of forwarded by John Major to be this thing that would fund all these wonderful cultural activities.

97, of course, ownership of the project is taken over by New Labour, the architects of what passed through the future at the time. So Jenny Page was drafted in to say, don't worry, you can still stay on as the head of the Millennium Experience. You have a budget of three quarters of a billion pounds. And that's a combination of national Lottery money, ticket revenue, where a ticket for a family of three was 57 pounds. That was a lot of money then too.

Yeah. And we expected 12 million visitors. For context, Euro Disney, after several relaunches, got 10 million visitors a year. And that's after several years and being Disney with like actual rides, as opposed to just a great big butt that you could walk into. Yeah. And also being run by the French Ice Skating Champion.

And also about a big trunch of the money was to come through corporate sponsorship and I've sort of hinted at how some of that cashed out. So Blair is sort of a cagey about taking it on, but he relents. He gives a speech in 1998. This is on the 24th of February. In the Millennium Experience, I want people to pause and reflect on this moment about the possibilities ahead of us and the values that guide us as a society. It will be an event to lift our horizons and a catalyst to imagine our futures.

As we approach the Millennium, can we boast that we have the richness of talent in this country that is unparalleled? The finest of artists, authors, architects, musicians, designers, animators, software makers, and scientists. So why not put them working on this project? So why not, he said, put it on display? This was supposed to be our vision of the 21st century, deindustrialized, high in service economy.

And what the sort of like high priest of neoliberalism can offer as to why we should do this is why not? We're going to hit a bottle of water. In another speech. They should have had the Rockford Speedway. In another speech, later on, he said, its content will contain a rich texture of feelings, spiritual, emotional, fun, exhilarating like Disney World, yet different,

educational and interactive like the Science Museum, yet different, emotional and uplifting like a West End musical and yet different. So what is it? That but not that. It's that but not that sketch. It's purely vibes. What we're going to do is because we're so great and we know we're so great as we are, we're just going to collect all of our greatness here.

But they again, they made the mistake on like previous epochs where Britain decided to put on an exhibition to sort of show the world what it could do or remind them that it exists. It forgot to have anything to show. Yeah. They needed they needed to like go back to basics and like put some fucking tanks in there or something, you know, slap something to slap the side of and say that it's a fantastic bit of kit.

You can't do that with a giant boy or you look like a nonce. Yeah. The Tory Millennium Dome, I hate to say it would have been a more interesting place to go because you would have had a tank in there. So well, they're very conspicuously weren't tanks, but we'll get to that. So this guy, Stephen Bailey has this company called Imagination. He's like a big old ex conran guy. I was drafted in by Mandelson, but then quit six months later because Mandelson

is trying to interfere too much in these artistic decisions. And Bailey is sort of portrayed and this is in a very good long read recently written by Image in West Nights is basically just lounging on the couch reading post for each meeting. So it's like the conflict between new labour's desire for mass appeal, but also their obsession with hiring only high brow prestigious people to create something that these deeply cynical people will think has mass appeal. We've got any ideas for this dome and the guys like you tried smelling a cake,

worked for this guy. So that's the thing. What we want to define the project of what to put in the dome is constant fighting between ministers who want to do like Aldi presents the shopping trolley of tomorrow and then the people they actually hired to do it who were like, I would like to get, you know, the YBAs to paint a mural of like, you know, something challenging and high brow. So the other thing is in the papers at the time in the late 90s,

you could not get away from the question of what the fuck is in the dome. Yeah. What's in the dome? What's in the dome? Remember the movie seven? What's in the dome? They were hyping up the dome, but they hadn't announced anything that was going to be in it because they didn't know. Nobody knows, but it's provocative.

So it gets people going. So everyone wanted to know it was in the dome from the select committee. This is from the select committee on dome to Mandelson. However inspirational the dome, the impact of the experience. Sometimes it is no substitute for, you know, a real loving relationship. However inspirational the dome, the impact of the experience will depend principally upon what is inside the dome. That's very true of the select committee.

It was on this most important topics that we found official witnesses to this inquiry to be least informative. Mandelson then goes on in this sort of parliamentary records to say, I assure the select committee it will be breathtaking, but I can say nothing further than this. This is just again a guy with like gummy bears in his briefcase. It's very great to be spinning like I have no idea as it's a secret. I love that. That's great.

And they went on to repeat this strategy with the Iraq war. Oh, there are. Don't worry. There's stuff in there. Oh boy, there is. It was one of the first mystery boxes. It was a loot crate. A loot box for the country. So in October 98 on the building site of the dome itself. This is just again, I don't know how to describe this as profoundly British,

but as soon as I tell you this, you will agree it is profoundly British. On October 1998 on the building site inside the dome itself, the BBC had a debate. This is also my image in West Nights article. By the way, the BBC held a televised debate about whether the dome was going to be good or bad. All the participants wore high vis jackets and hard hats. Awesome. All right. Art critic Brian Sewell jabbed his finger at the Dome's director of operations,

Ken Robinson, and demanded repeatedly tell us what's in it. Robinson declined to say anything. I'm pleading the fist on the dome content. That will come up. Do not mention what is in the dome when the police ask you. Just ask for a solicitor and say nothing else. I'm looking for some pictures right now and I'm kind of like, if I was a normal person, I wouldn't be able to describe most things.

So maybe it wasn't that they were keeping a surprise. Maybe it was because they literally just couldn't describe what was inside it. I can't say it's just a giant boy. Trying to find the words for the giant boy. How do you tell people, like an ordinary person, there is a giant boy inside? Well, it's not quite naked. Because the thing is right.

He's on his launches. Close enough for it to be very strange. How do you describe something that is supposed to appeal to literally everybody, uplift and empower them while at the same time, angering no one? Well, we have a word for that now and it's called Ed Sheeran. That boy grew up to be Ed Sheeran. Yeah, exactly.

The little ginger boy in the dark. I now want to give you an example of how the hype actually worked, right? And this is an excerpt from Peter O'Born's book, The Rise of Political Lying. We are talking about a game called surf ball. Now, I'm sure it's the sport of the 21st century, as I was assured by Peter Mandelson in the parliamentary records that I've read.

And so I imagine everyone's been playing it in Britain. You've all played surf ball, right? Of course, yeah. Well, I'm asked in Parliament about surf ball. He divulged a few details, but described it as an interactive attraction, which comes into the working title of play at surf ball, the new 21st century sport.

The Times stated that Mr. Mandelson offered the committee a glimpse of the dome's attractions. The most exciting entertainment would be an interactive computer game called surf ball, which he described as the sport of the 21st century and a 15-minute roller coaster ride. Okay. The following week, Mandelson once again said,

the contents of the millennium experience will attract people of all ages, although I expect that playing surf ball, the 21st century sport, will have a special appeal to young people. And then... Why does it say surf ball, the 21st century sport, every time? Is it like a tribe called quest, where you have to say the whole thing? He then wrote, a few days later, in the evening standard,

if you don't panic, there's more than surf ball. And then back bench Labour MPs... He's been tugging at his collar. Back bench Labour MPs also started talking about surf ball. Jim Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar in Canningtown, my old MP, declared that the sport would bring regeneration to his constituency. What? I wouldn't contemplate surfing a ball myself, he declared.

I just want to see 1.6 million surf ballers arriving. Okay, allow me to just hit me out for a second here. What the fuck is surf ball? What's the sport of the 21st century? That's what I'm hearing. And it would create so many jobs for surf ball manufacturers, surf ball coaches, surf ball physios. I have to admit, I didn't realize you were making a joke.

I thought this was just some arcane British sport that you have to play in school, that you all knew it was and it was real. I've never heard this word before in my life. That is actually like a relief to me because I was like, God, this country is even fucking dearer than I thought. I mean, it would have been funny to gaslight you for the rest of the hour, but no. You never played surf ball?

This guy's never played surf ball. I actually represented my county in surf ball. It's actually surf with a D. So the city of Durham MP, Jerry Steinberg, stated the sport was quite exciting. What's the deal? I don't deny that it's very exciting. My secretary will definitely play surf ball.

I like the idea of Jerry Steinberg being an off-brand Jerry Seinfeld, but we've got his... Watford MP Claire Ward, who was on the Commons Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee, conjured up the image of surf ballers wearing some kind of virtual millennium headgear that you put on with gloves that are connected up to a bodysuit. So when you move, you feel as if you're part of the balls running in your headset.

Wait, so you're part of the... Look, because you're a ball in your head. It's surf ball. Yeah. But it's a sport, not a video game, but it is played in an immersive computer simulation that's indistinguishable from reality. Oh, it's Tron.

No, it's Ender's Game. You're actually piloting a drone over a rock. And it was revealed, indeed, a computer scientist at Yale called Kentaro Toyama, looked at this in the archives, and created a device called a surf ball that was essentially a motion tracking device for gaming. When asked about this by the Independent,

he says, I've never heard of Peter Mandelson or the Millennium Experience. Who are you and what are you talking about? Awesome. There was never a surf ball. It was nothing. It was just basically, they said, well, they're asking for some specifics.

So I'm going to just sort of invent the 21st century sport on the fly and then say, basically, it's going to be what becomes the metaverse. Did this man then end up falling down at a distinctly non-vegan staircase? So, and this is just like the, I think the best example of just like every, everyone kind of coming to an agreement that, well, technology is quite wonderful.

And I assume that we'll all be sort of basically living in the computer soon anyway. So even if we haven't invented the future yet, we know what future we are inventing, and we assume it'll be ready in time for the Millennium. So we're just all going to go four square in behind surf ball. So this is now Jenny Page. This is back from Hansard being questioned in 99.

Page says, the zone, the play zone is going to be very interesting. Frankly, I think it will, it has come a very, very long way since we last debated it. Right now, we'll have quite a number of interactive games. They're not the sort of games that you think they will be. They really are not. We have very clear editorial control,

and what we're proposing in that zone is taking forward electronic play into the areas which nobody has seen in operation before, and it will be radically different from an arcade. It will be like an arcade at all. Robert Eiling MP asks, so the surf ball is now dead and buried? Jenny Page responds, I plead the fifth on surf ball. I will keep you guessing on surf ball until we open.

Robert Eiling presses the question. So the surf ball is still in existence. Ms. Page responds, I plead the fifth amendment. Wait, so she's working for the British government, but she doesn't understand what the fifth amendment is. I think it's more of a colloquialism of saying, I'm not going to answer your question. I will not talk about the surf ball,

but I promise it will be incredible under any circumstance. I demand a lawyer. It's just basically, if it is, it's the metaverse version one of just a bunch of charlatans making a grandiose claim about a totally immersive computer simulation in order to just like keep their plate spinning for another day. I would have liked if Jenny Page had said, can we please get the mockery out of the way?

I was just going to say, I just remembered that at the dome, there was actually a plate spinning exhibition. There was, fuck, yes, I remember this. There was a plate spinning exhibition. I just, I think it was weird. I think it was weird of them to get Johannes Vonck and the clog heads to do a surf ball song for them. There was actually an exhibit of Dutch child pornography.

That is to say pornography for children, not pornography featuring children, which is disgusting. Yeah, there's a music video hidden somewhere in like the National Archives where Tony Blair plays the guitar on a Johannes Vonck and the clog head song. Yeah. So in 98, Mandelson has the first of two sort of impropriety related political scandals that sort of damage his career. The second one.

That's such a cop phrasing, an improprietary related scandal. So this is a Mandelson-involved twink. So this involves him basically having an undeclared loan from a major donor. The second of this, and so he's fired as minister for dome. I noticed the gentleman had applied lubrication to the staircase. And then the second scandal, of course, being getting the free flat from Ellie Khalil, who was implicated in the equatorial Guinea coup. Wasn't the free flat with Ellie Khalil also the place where he was photographed

staring at one Jeffrey Epstein across a very large vase? I always thought they were going belt shopping. He is holding a white belt in that photo. So it did seem, unless belts are just strung around the house with the buttery staircase, it did look like they were actually shopping. Basically. So we're at this point, right? Where Mandelson is sort of on his way out.

He's not out yet. Where Falconer is on his way and he's not in yet. We've decided that about one-fifth of the total amount of money that we're going to spend in the Millennium Dome is going to come from sponsors. The rest is going to be lottery money. And we sort of have our plan to have 12 million people. The most successful exhibit of its kind in like the continental region. Are going as that same place.

Absolutely. That's what's needed to make this thing a success. So this is again during a debate on the dome in 1998 when Mandelson still in charge debate the dome. He says construction is on time. And if anything, it's ahead of time. Spending it was within budget costs are firmly under control and creative development of the Dome's contents has leaped ahead.

Arrangements from the national program are well in hand. Millennium company is performing highly competently. It's doing a job of utmost importance to the country and deserves our support. That's a classic Mandelson lie to be like construction is on time and then becoming emboldened a little bit by hearing yourself say it. If anything, it's ahead of time. Not only is this a ball, there are other kinds of ball which I won't go into. We have created a new dimension of computer simulation in the dome.

That's right. There's stuff being presented in 5D. So this is again back to image in West Knights retrospective on the dome. She said she quotes an exhibition designer Peter Higgins. New labor really did think it was going to be some sort of quasi political sociological experience that would underpin everything they were about. However, under Mandelson and in a way it did. Well, that's just a thing.

It did. Yeah. It's just not in the way that they sort of expected, not in the way that they foresaw. They really are Greek tragic figures. They're just fulfilling the prophecy, but no in any of the ways they expect. And Higgins says that the brief was very thin. They weren't given any kind of budget at all. And instead we're just given some open-ended questions like are you what you eat?

Will designer people be around later? And for sign of people. And Blair said that all he was interested in was content that had what he called quote the Ewan factor, which is cool enough that his 13 year old son would want to see it. Oh, yeah. That's what makes it cool. I thought it was going to be at least like a good Ewan like Ewan McGregor or something. He was pretty cool at the time.

Nope. It's a lame Ewan. Ewan Blair, who went on to become a startup guy, the least cool kind of guy you can be. And so this was the main clash, right? In the furnishing of this thing that was supposed to propel Britain into the future. That was going to be the thesis statement of what the future was going to be. Was political advisors who basically wanted like, Oh, he presents the shopping cart of the future.

And then the zone designers who were basically very snobbish and high-brow. Yeah. And so this is loose. They wanted like Marinetti presents the shopping cart of the future. So this is further from Knight's article with more than 30,000 visitors expected every day in 2000. The dome would need extensive catering. There would be two enormous branches of McDonald's as well as a Yo Sushi and a cafe called Simply Internet. Yo Sushi was the most futuristic shit you could imagine in the year 2000.

And that was like, Yo, it has a conveyor belt. That's why it was called Yo Sushi because you went in there and you went Yo. I'm a big fan of Simply Internet. I have to say. And so this is this is Bailey. We're talking about the designer says he rouse the catering. He proposed a farmer's market. You could have had sourdough bread and goat's cheese.

Instead, the public had to eat filth from McDonald's. Filth. I didn't know McDonald's served filth, but there you go. So it is just the that everybody, every single person involved in the dome does have a different kind of contempt for everyone that lives in Britain. It's just do you think that they need to be uplifted by exposure to your middle class tastes? Or do you think that they're a bunch of like, you know, ignorant sloth hogs who need to be just jammed through sort of whatever fast food company will give you, you know, 20 pounds. It's both of these both of these positions. It should be like a fundamental contempt for the anyone who is going to come in and actually go through this dome.

The people of Britain must be funneled through a series of narrow canals where they'll be washed by the students of the Millennium. So basically this is the then sort of in Mandelson is sacked. Charlie Faulkner comes in and Faulkner that interviewed in The Guardian at the time says, I'm confident it won't go wrong. Quite the reverse. The dome has been a triumph. I'm confident it will go out. You say that you say the untruth and then you double down on it in the second sentence. If anything, it's going to go fantastic.

The dome has been a triumph for mainly British contractors and designers. It has regenerated a poison site and it will create jobs and will be enormous fun. The underground links will certainly did create jobs. I mean, there are a lot of people who I feel like should never have had a job who got a job making this. The underground links will all be built and operating. We will be glad we did it. Believe me, write that down. We will be glad we did it.

Lenny, you're writing this down because you should. It's worth. It's worth jotting down. He's also adamant that all the zones will be ready as to what's in them. He believes will be very interesting but declines to say more. We have done it to show what the UK can do. Yeah, fucking nothing. Can build a big tent with a giant child.

We built a big boy. We built a big lad. There's a McDonald's, a Yo Sushi. Weird mouth. We're a nation of weird treat boys. Yeah, we built some spinning coins. Absolutely. An exhibition called the British economy.

He is now responsible for finding a use for the dome after the millennium year. There are some interesting suggestions in tenders. It is clear, but he's remains coy as to who is suggesting what to do. And again, yeah. Mystery. Three governments. This is fucking unboxing ass way of framing public policy. This does sort of, I think, betray one new labor obsession that comes out later on,

which is the real hostility towards any public scrutiny of anything they're doing because they will believe it will somehow be ruined by people knowing about it. They were insanely hostile to freedom of information requests, for example, we spoke with in our episodes about the home office and stuff. And these were new labor reforms. It's just here. What they're doing is they're doing this, they're doing it for in service of something fundamentally goofy,

but they're doing it, they're nevertheless betraying this, even before 2001, this very inner authoritarian tendency of theirs. I'm very confident that not only are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but also that there is a surf ball. What's really grim is that this kind of authoritarianism, as you say, appears to derive entirely from an urge to showmanship. Well, in this case, it certainly does. I think, in general, it tends to derive from this idea of their own inherent greatness

in that other people will not understand how great it is what they're doing and will try to get in the way of their utopian vision, but their liberal utopian vision. Yeah, exactly. Or the Labour Party's actual members and people in Britain who vote. I do find it's very funny how this is relevant, again, both because it's weird, but also because Peter Manelson has been restored to a position of profound authority within the Labour Party. And looking at this stuff, you were just reminded how much utter contempt they have

for people who aren't with them or who aren't in their club, but also, I think, more than anything else, how fucking weird and out of touch they all are for all of the accusations of the previous four and a half years of the Labour Party that we won't talk about, like of them being out of touch with the average person. I cannot, under any circumstances, believe that, like, oh, yeah, if you put this weird shit, like Peter Manelson, Jeffrey Epstein's friend and the house with buttery stairs versus Jeremy Corbyn rides a bike and is a vegetarian, which of those sounds weirder? Like, which of those is less relatable?

And I don't want to, like, I don't want to, like, shoehorn, you know, Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader into the discussion too much here, but I'm just like, these people are so fucking weird. Like, I thought Mike Skinner from The Streets was being just, like, office head on drugs when he just went on that weird rant about Peter Manelson, but I think he was right. I think Peter Manelson did somehow go, here are strange voices and got his brain fried on something fucking strange, and they had to, like, send him away to be reprogrammed, genuinely.

Like, well, I was going to say, right, it's this, this, you can't imagine sort of just how fucking weird you have to be to, A, invent just a lie about, like, again, I'm going to invent what's going to become the Metaverse. It's called Surfball. And then for everybody in your, like, little friend club to just fall in and perfectly pick up the lie until it's just found out as soon as someone asks an obvious question, hey, you seem to have invented something similar called the same thing. Is this what that is?

And then he says, no, I don't know these people. Like, how fucking weird do you have to be to do that? It's the weirdness of these people and the fact that, like, correct me if I'm wrong, but was the Millennium Dome received with any kind of, like, criticism or sort of lukewarm response? Was it actually enthusiastically received? Because it just, there's this, there's this problem that I have when I look at any of this period of British politics, which is that you always assume because it's so fucking weird

and just, like, wrongheaded that surely once it makes contact with reality with normal people, then it's, you know, revealed to be the farce that it is. And yet that never seems to happen in this country. Oh, no, we love clown shit in this country. Like, at the time, I would, I mean, I was a child, but, like, people were into it. Like, partly because there was no, you had no idea what it actually was. You were just being told it was going to be awesome. The Dome!

Certainly, the London Eye was much more the kind of, like, the legacy of it, I think. Like, in the sense that, like, the London Eye became a, like, legend slash hen party night out in London fixture come down from Kettering for a big one, you know. Well, the thing is, right, you ask, it was well received while who buy. And this is where these, this thing gets a very confused legacy because a lot of journalists and editors hated it because many of them were invited to this opening party, but then at the Millennium Dome, but then not treated like the important special boys they all thought they were.

And so they kind of declared a vendetto on the Dome. And a lot of the people who did like the Dome were sort of children who were just like, it's kind of a day out and they're easy to impress. But they didn't sell nearly as many tickets as they thought they would. They sold only six of the projected 12 million. That's still quite a bit. They sold six tickets. Six tickets.

And the whole thing was sort of, it seems popular in sort of official memory. It's remembered as a flop, but it's difficult to parse. So in fact, the opening... Anything would be remembered as a flop if you hype it up to the extent that this had been hyped up because that's the abiding memory that I have of the Dome, is how much the government and this filtered all the way down to like your teacher even, just were not allowed to shut the fuck up about the Dome or the Millennium. It was like, it was hyped up to the extent that anything would have been a disappointment.

And so the opening night itself, again, was because it's Britain plagued by huge infrastructural problems. So the Queen, the PM, one of these grandees, lords and ladies, celebrities and so on, all went to the Dome. But a bunch of guests just weren't sent their tickets and so had to go to Stratford Tube Station to then get on the Jubilee line to come down. And they queued for like hours because the security scanners that were set up to make sure like metal detectors and stuff were incorrectly installed backwards and so didn't work. And so everyone in their black tie was issued like an airline meal and a quarter-sized bottle of discount champagne.

When they got in, they were treated to a concert featuring Stephen Fry, the Coors, Jules Holland and Mick Hucknell. We celebrated it with a fucking hootenanny. Of course we did. I'm just imagining the Coors just changing the lyrics to their hit song, Breathless, just instead of, you know, whatever the lyrics were, it just becomes, Do, wo, do, wo. Sorry, you didn't laugh at that.

I'm just still, I get angry every time anyone mentions Jules Holland to me. Our most inexplicable fixture of the national fucking topography. This guy who like sees your hit song and goes, Is it okay if I come down and play like two notes on a piano to make it boogie woogie? And we as a nation all just say, yes, that's fine actually. It's very funny because Jules Holland was in squeeze. Like he was a normal musician, like guy in a band once. He was just the keyboardist for squeeze.

But now he's just become Mr. New Year. Yeah. Now he's just the guy who's on TV all the time and has been. I mean, I remember bands that I was into in the early 2000s when I was still in high school, you know, would perform on Jules Holland, whatever the show was called. And you'd find those clips on like fucking. Yeah, you'd find those clips on like WinMX or whatever, you know, of bands performing. And it's just crazy that, you know, people were talking about,

Yeah, just just New Year's 2022. Jules Holland still there, still just fucking doing his thing. It's because Britain never really changes. It just sort of, it slowly gets worse. So. Duh whom, duh whom, that boy is naked. I just find it very cute that like even like decades, decades before like the current situation of columnists,

like they're kind of grievances are still exactly the same. And it's like, they'll kind of hold you accountable and call you out and your shit. But only if they like feel they've been mistreated. I mean, the dome would have had a much more hostile reception had Twitter been accident. It's the thing. Like all you need is a photo of someone's airline style plastic meal and it would have gone over like firefest. So the page, Jenny page is fired almost immediately.

And then as your bow takes over with. Yeah. Who will rescue this troubled project? How about the king of French ice? That's right. To be fair. Also, he was an executive at Euro Disney, which did sort of turn around. Yeah.

Fair do hockey do glass has a lot of crossover actually with them with the surf ball. So the millennia mix, this is, this goes from, from an ad that was running towards the, once they realized this was not a very good dome. The millennium experience at the dome is going to close forever. Maybe you'll love it. Maybe you won't. Why not come and decide for yourself while you still can. In the kist armor voice, maybe give it a go.

Give it a go. It's a yoga. Yeah. So look, I'm going to, I'm going to leave the first episode there. The second episode, we're going to go into the dome, go ex exhibit by exhibit. We're going to look at two men enter one man. Yeah. We're going to be getting dome.

We're going to be looking at the exhibit by exhibit. We're going to be looking at the legacy of the dome, the aftermath, more careers being damaged by elements of it. And we'll see you on the bonus episode. Thanks everybody. Bye.