British Museums

Tuesday

Flora Watkins

Don’t bother with the Bayeux Tapestry

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.

Thursday

Sam Kriss

How do you exhibit living deities?

The most-watched TV programme in human history isn’t the Moon landings, and it isn’t M*A*S*H; chances are it’s Ramayan, a magnificently cheesy 1980s adaptation of India’s national epic. The show has a status in India that’s hard to overstate. Something like 80 per cent of the entire population watched its original run; in rural areas entire villages would crowd around a single television hooked up to a car battery. When the show ended, omitting the ‘Uttara Kanda’, the fairly controversial last book of the original poem, street sweepers across the country went on strike, demanding the government fund more episodes. The government caved. But while every country has its pieces of cult media, in India the cult is literal. Some viewers would take a ritual bath before tuning in.