Thursday night optimism

I went out with Naomi last night to see the Da Vinci Code - in brief:

1. It was more fast-paced than the book. They did well to cover the whole story within the medium of a 2hr film, but the first fifteen minutes actually felt very rushed, and the Langdon character was able to make mental connections at a quite unrealistic pace.

2. It was no less saccharine than the book. The major holes in history, theology and basic logic were glaring, and leapt out of Teabing's dialogue to accompany the plasma screen scene. The problem is that a lot of people will take this stuff as gospel (hehe), and don't actually have a background that allows them to make proper criticism of convenient glossing to support the narrative. I can't be bothered to go into it at length now, but some of it was very far-fetched.

3. Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard. This is flat-out ridiculous for anyone who's been to university (and don't forget, that's supposed to be 50-60% of us now, New Labour kids!!). I suppose Harvard has a whole faculty of 'religious symbologists' for Langdon to preside over as well, does it?

If you want to read more (prolly not, eh?), the New Statesman review isn't too bad, save for its squealing "most people will need a lot more convincing before they start denying evolution and insist that female reproductive organs are public property" rubbish.

Anyway, what brought me to write a blog post here was not Dan Brown's successful leveraging of about £15 for a book and cinema ticket, out of my (and everyone else's) pockets (and against the odds, now I think about it...), but a conversation I overheard in the pub before I went to see the film.

There was a bloke a little bit older than me talking to a middle-aged feller about a visit to a museum he'd recently made on holiday. I didn't catch the beginning of the conversation, but I got the impression it was probably a French museum somewhere. He was saying how it had only cost him 6 Euros, "that's only about four quid isn't it", and what good value for money he felt he'd had. He went on to tell the older man how he would happily pay this to go to museums in the UK, which were of a much higher quality still, in his opinion. The older man agreed. Their conversation moved on to other things, and they left the pub.

Listening to them, I realised just how reasonable they both were. Both men who, from their brief exchange that I'd overheard, put a value in things that are edifying. I realised that, however reasonable their feelings towards paying for a valuable heritage service, these views were isolated in a vacuum of ignorance of the motives and dogmas of modern politics. These men were probably a little too old and a little too Middle England to be aware of the creed of 'access' that now drives our taxpayer's pound. I'm sure museum curators the country over are only too aware of the problems this brings.

Anyone visiting museums in London would see that the chief beneficiaries of New Labour's free museums policy (admittedly, conceived with a good will) have been foreign tourists who no longer pay admission. But they still bring the same wear and tear to the buildings, and now the museums are funded less than they were when they were able to charge. This is a classic case of the unintended consequences of an 'access' policy. In the headlong rush to be seen to address the interests of the UK's welfare/low income or minority ethnic populations, a very different beneficiary group comes out the other side of the equation. What I'm trying to illustrate here is that the two museum-goers in the pub are actually not the demographic the politicians want to go to museums, and are actually quite different again from those who stand to gain from wrong-headed 'access' policies.