If in this season of annual achievement awards there were one for the biggest New Year’s bang and sorriest year-ending whimper, the winner would be Britain’s entrant, the Millennium Dome (千 年圆顶).
No country built more ambitious millennial projects and talked them up with more hucksterism than Britain, and the centerpiece was the $1.2 billion Dome, located on the meridian that gave the name to Greenwich Mean Time and gave Prime Minister Tony Blair the opportunity to proclaim Britain in 2000 as the " home of time" His closest political associate and first director of the project, Peter Mandelson, said, "Other countries will be kicking themselves that they did not have the imagination to go ahead as we did. "
That the project had to dump its English director and two English chairmen and turn to a new chief executive who not only learned his trade at Disneyland Paris but also was a Frenchman is an indication of just how much a triumph of British ingenuity the project ended up not being.
Actually the trouble with the Dome began on opening night. Thousands of the invitees got stuck on the new subway line that had been built to speed people from central London out to Greenwich, and others who managed to arrive could not get past security to see the show. Fatally for the Dome, among the barred and detoured were the editors of some of Britain’s biggest newspapers.
If opening night gave the vengeance-bent media a shovel, the hapless Dome operators supplied the dirt, and the piles of bad publicity mounted.
Some attractions had lines that were intolerably long, others had no lines because they were deemed so uninspiring. Ticket and transportation foul-ups abounded. The displays and zones were roundly condemned as falling far short of their purpose of showing Britain at its inventive best.
People stayed away, and by the spring, the massive space was virtually deserted on weekdays. The original projection of 12 million visitors was officially scaled back a number of times.
In fact, the project may be more a victim of its own hyped expectations than of its actual performance. The anticipated final figures of 6.5 million visitors (5.7 million paying) compares favorably with other London tourist attractions, and surveys show 85% customer satisfaction.
The government will soon negotiate a deal to sell off the Dome and much of the land around it to Legacy PLC, an Irish-English development company that plans to build middle-class and luxury housing on the site and to turn the huilding into a high-tech business center with 14,000 jobs.
"If opening night gave the vengeance-bent media a spade, the hapless Dome operators supplied the dirt" probably means that the Dome ______.