Forgive me for being smug, but I saw the Bayeux Tapestry in Bayeux two years ago. It cost about eight euros, there was hardly anyone in the museum and I also got to drink a lot of excellent cheap wine, eat moules à la Normande every night and visit several D-Day sites, for some mechanised slaughter, rather than the stitched 11th century variety.
Give a Gallic shrug, open a wine in a can and plan a trip to Normandy next year
We shrieked over the vast, blown-up photos of Charles de Gaulle ‘liberating’ Bayeux, about two weeks after British troops had liberated it, which had been put up ahead of the 80th anniversary. I was able to parlez plenty of franglais with my eldest son whilst inoculating him against ever starting a war when he grows up – or letting defence expenditure drop below 3 per cent of GDP – by making him stand on the shoreline on Omaha Beach and consider how soldiers got from there up onto the bluffs under sustained machine gun and artillery fire. (Answer: with considerable carnage. Also, will you take your hands out of your pockets for the Last Post?)
Now, for approximately the price of the car ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe (£36.50, including suggested donation), you and a friend can view the tapestry in the British Museum. But only if you had the foresight to log onto the website when tickets went on sale at 10am back on 1st July and sat patiently as your place in the queue ticked down from 76,781. Some sat in the queue for nine hours, though you could skip it by a) buying a hotel package from One Aldwych (prices from £1,000 for two) or b) being Peter Thiel, who was reportedly given a private view last month. It’s completely sold out until the New Year, though another lot of tickets drops on 21st October.
The nation is collectively losing its mind over (‘the most moving moment of my career!’, gushed one critic) what’s being billed as the highest point in Anglo-French relations since the Entente Cordiale. Emmanuel Macron joined the King and Queen and the prime minister for the launch. Andy Burnham took the opportunity to make a lame joke about the tapestry showing ‘a new leader emerging from a northern territory and travelling to the south of England’. There’s a rather more obvious gag that springs to mind on viewing the tapestry – one about stopping the boats – but that would have spoilt the cross-channel love-in.
Macron declared the loan to be an example of ‘how we are united’, but actually, the tapisserie museum in Bayeux is closed for refurbishment until September 2027. So in effect, the British Museum’s new blockbuster exhibition is just free storage for the French for a year. In return, we’re sending them the Lewis chessmen and some of the Sutton Hoo bling. Plus £650m to stop the boats.
Blockbuster shows are a terrible form of entertainment. This might be the worst yet. Insanely over-priced and overcrowded, you’ll be lucky if you catch a glimpse of Halley’s Comet or the arrow in Harold’s eye or any of the 93 penises (totted up by Professor George Garrett of St Hugh’s College, Oxford – it’s not just Cambridge that’s lowered its standards) through the rows of iPads held aloft. A friend who got into a preview said even that was horribly busy and ranted online about ‘so many people being absolute CLOTS… experiencing this once-in-a-millennium moment through their damn phones’, adding that the whole thing is scanned in HD and available online anyway.
Bizarrely, the British Museum is displaying the tapestry flat, so unless you’re 6ft 6” or own a periscope, you may see nothing at all in the ‘atmospheric darkness’ of the gallery. In Bayeux, it’s on the wall. Call me Sybil Colefax, but surely this is where tapestries are supposed to be displayed? Otherwise what you’re looking at is effectively an extremely long and elaborate stair runner.
Blockbusters also attract a lot of undesirables; people who have little interest in the art or artefacts, but do love a status update. Van Gogh at the National Gallery 18 months ago clogged my Instagram feed with insufferable and near-identical posts of starry nights, wheatfields and chairs accompanied by inane, FOMO-inducing comments. ‘I finally made it!’ ‘Blown away!’ ‘DO believe the hype!’
The National Gallery has long since relaxed its restrictions on photos, phones and iPads, supposedly on the grounds that they can’t police it, but I suspect it has more to do with fomenting the sort of deranged hysteria that could be expected should Elvis announce a new residency in Vegas.
I took my kids to the Van Gogh on the last day, hoping they’d have an outside chance of getting up close and looking at the brush work, seeing how he used thick swirls of paint to convey movement and drama etc. But an official dragon ticked them off for being too close to Starry Night Over the Rhône – to which I retorted that things have come to a pretty pass when a child can’t look closely at a painting WITH HIS OWN EYES, but hundreds of unmanned human drones are allowed to file past viewing the whole thing through a screen. We kept being asked to move out of the way by people filming. ‘No’ and ‘sod off’ are the only acceptable responses to such a request. Be bold: you’re not going to get shanked in the National Gallery.
I’ve succumbed to blockbuster fever myself, twice buying annual membership of the V&A to get into the sold-out McQueen and Dior exhibitions when flexing my press card didn’t work.
The most recent show I saw there was the Cartier last year, but only because a friend involved with it took me. Yes, the baubles certainly sparkled prettily. But I’d have been pretty peed off to have spent £30 to look at some rather sparse exhibits (a scant half-hour’s entertainment), largely lent by vulgar, repressive regimes that, when not buying up Wallis Simpson’s baubles, sign generous cheques to Hamas.
So I’m off blockbusters for good. I’m sorry but I am not married to an OLIGARCH. Also, I fear a conviction for battery with a Samsung Galaxy is a very real possibility. I really wouldn’t bother setting your alarm for the next drop of Bayeux Tapestry tickets: give a Gallic shrug, open a wine in a can and plan a trip to Normandy next year.
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