Stand up for real stars

The celebrity culture which has put paid to the Planetarium is a blow to British science. How can we give our children back a sense of awe about space?

Published in the Evening Standard 2 February 2006

It was the second day of this year and, like lots of parents caught in the twilight zone between Christmas and the new school term, we needed to come up with a fun day out for the kids. So, like lots of parents, we headed to the Science Museum.

And I do mean lots. The place was heaving, every floor jammed with
families. Outside the "pattern zone,” where toddlers could discover the laws of interlocking shapes through touching, dancing and crawling, was a motorway pile-up of push-chairs. The basement area of hands-on experiments, featuring magnet cars, air-pumped planes and a Heath Robinson style gravel-moving machine, was filled with a permanent, ear-splitting din – like a school playground moved indoors.

Every child was feverish with excitement, leaping from one model or
gizmo to the next. Only one thing could divert them: the announcement that "the rocket show" was about to begin. At which point, they all crammed into an even smaller space to hear a young guide in a T-shirt teach them the rudiments of rocketry. They sat, listened and concentrated as she burst a balloon or set fire to an empty Pringles can to explain the basic principles of spacecraft. It was rocket science – and these kids loved it.

All of which came back to me on hearing that the London Planetarium is to close after nearly 50 years of service. I hadn’t yet taken my two boys, four and two, to the vast, stellar dome on Baker Street: I had stored it up as a treat to come. Now I plan to rush them in before that great unnatural sky is shut down – converted into a new Madame Tussauds attraction, one that spokeswoman Diane Moon says will “look at fame and celebrity through the ages.” Expect a giant laser projection of Elizabeth I rapidly morphing into Kylie and Chantelle.

It’s not that Madame Tussauds have got something against the night sky. It’s just that the punters stopped coming. The appropriately named Ms Moon tells me that for every ten people who came to look at the waxworks, only three bothered visiting the planetarium – even though their ticket granted them entry for no extra charge. Recently, Tussauds cut the long, detailed show I remember from childhood down to just 10 minutes. But even that was too much. “Visitors said, ‘We were bored senseless by that bit; we wanted to see celebrities.’”

This decision tells us so much about the state of the world in the 21st century, it could almost be an exhibit of its own. First, it confirms that we truly live in the age of celebrity. Those Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan epigrams about everyone being famous for 15 minutes and the medium being the message contained even greater wisdom than we imagined. It is not just funny that the BBC made George Galloway’s eviction from Celebrity Big Brother the third item on the Ten O’Clock News – ahead of the education white paper – it is revealing. Just as it is no coincidence that Heat magazine is one of the publishing phenomena of our time, its snaps of actresses’ cellulite a mass-circulation smash with a hundred imitators. These things flourish because they give us what we want: the chance to stare at famous people.

I am not immune to this: I sat glued to the sight of Galloway in a leotard along with everyone else. But I have to confess I have never understood the appeal of waxwork dummies of celebrities. I genuinely cannot comprehend what would be interesting about a mannequin of Tom Cruise. But now we know. People would rather look at a stationary, fake Victoria Beckham than have the sensation of gazing at the midnight sky in perfect, pin-sharp clarity.

Perhaps Madame Tussauds were simply aiming at the wrong market. Most of their 2m annual customers come to gawp at stuffed celebrities: no wonder they didn’t fancy a quick peek at the solar system. No, says Ms Moon: even when the Planetarium was a stand-alone attraction, separate from the waxworks and marketed in Astronomy Now and the like, it didn’t pull in the crowds.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. The market has spoken, telling us we want movie stars of hair and teeth not distant ones of light and gas. Perhaps we should just let it go.

But I can’t quite accept that. For one thing, we need all the tools of basic science education we can get. A study published last November warned that the teaching of physics was in danger of dying out in British schools, with the number taking A-levels in the subject falling by 38% since 1990, a problem compounded by a shortage of physics teachers.

In this ultra-competitive global economy, in which technology and
innovation play such a crucial part, we simply cannot afford science to wither. We need to get kids enthused by it early – and the wide-eyed, open-mouthed experience of the London Planetarium was one of the few guaranteed ways to do it.

Luckily there is an alternative. A year from now the Royal Observatory at Greenwich will open a new, state-of-the-art, 120-seat planetarium. Currently kids can visit Greenwich for free and the Observatory plans to keep admission costs for the new attraction ultra-low – quite a contrast with Madame Tussauds, where an adult ticket costs #21.99 while a child has to pay #17.99.

Still, this is not a complete solution. The London Planetarium was bigger, with 398 seats, and more central than Greenwich. Turning it over to a celeb light show means losing a unique educational asset. I understand that it no longer made a profit for the already super-profitable Tussauds. But it’s a pity the company couldn’t find some way to let this resource be used for the public good. Rich lawyers do pro-bono cases, good works taken on for no charge. Isn’t it about time that some of London’s wealthiest enterprises started to do the same?

Posted on February 2, 2006 11:26 PM

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