YOU can tell how far the London Planetarium has sunk into a black hole of dumbness the moment you hand over your positively cosmic £22.99 entrance fee.
Would you like, for an additional £4.50, a souvenir guide with Kylie Minogue on the cover, or would you prefer David Beckham? “You choose,” we said to the cashier. She chose Kylie.
When the Planetarium opened in 1958 the world was agog at the heavens, not least because the Russians had just snatched a stray dog from a Moscow street and sent her into orbit. The universe was still mysterious, and watching the bafflingly complex Zeiss projector track the movement of the constellations across the inside of the Baker Street dome for a full 45 minutes was at once awe-inspiring, neck-wrenching, educational and blissfully relaxing.
Since then we have had Moon-walks, Mars probes, space shuttles, and Star Trek.
Ten minutes is all you get at a Planetarium now in its red-dwarf stage of near-extinction. In truth, it is now a cinema, with its screen on the ceiling. A sore neck is still part of the experience.
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At the noon screening yesterday the 350-seat auditorium was less than half-full, mainly with the foreign young. In the inky darkness an unseen compere asked if there was anyone there from France. “Oui,” an equally unseen customer piped up. Were we mistakenly at an end-of-pier variety show? No, we were at the cinema, and the ensuing brief screening was not so much a brief education in astronomy as an extended trailer for Star Wars or some other space movie. It would have been thin gruel to Professor Stephen Hawking or Sir Patrick Moore.
Sad to say, the audience loved it, and a straw poll at the exit indicated widespread approbation for what is at least a visual, if not unduly instructional, feast. Being mostly foreign tourists, none of them knew that the show used to be 45 minutes long, beautifully gentle and serious.
“That was so fantastique,” said Jean-Claude Charpentier, a student from Limoges in France, who had sat in the back row with his girlfriend. Ten cinematic minutes of planets isn’t even enough time for a decent snog.