Postscripts by Seafarer POSTSCRIPTS Dome’s day ib hardly augured well that the day Mr and Mrs Seafarer decided to visit the Dome turned out to be the day it was announced that a Euro-Disney executive was taking charge. So would we be among the 85% of visitors who had responded positively to their “one amazing day”, or would Sea of Faith join the 87% of the press which has blown raspberries at the whole project?
To Seafarer’s surprise (I'll leave Mrs S out of this), I found it stunning. First, the sheer scale and beauty of the structure is breath-taking. To walk out of Greenwich North station into the Dome precinct and on to the Dome itself is to travel out of the old and into the new millennium: from here to postmodernity. If every one of the Zones had been closed, I could have spent a day revelling in the architecture and design alone.
As it was, in the seven hours we were there, we had time for only seven of the 14 major zones. Most made wonderfully inventive use of advanced and interactive technology to inform, educate, entertain, dazzle and delight. Yes, there was information overload, too much sound, light, words, sensation, coming at you from all quarters, but you learned to let it flow over you and leave your mind to absorb what it could and let the rest go.
Body was good (especially for children), Mind made you think, and think about what you were thinking with (but I was disappointed that the computer promising me a sex-change was out of use).
Home Planet (a space trip) and Journey were memorable, though the latter (sponsored by Ford) had too much Ford.
The centre-piece show in the space beyond the Zones (itself the size of ‘Trafalgar Square) was as spectacular as the story was naff. Watching Melvyn Brage’s South Bank Show when we got home that evening, though, we learned that great chunks of the original concept had had to be dropped because the technology wasn’t up to it. Which only demonstrated that creative ambition had soared beyond the capacity of even the most advanced technology to deliver - as yet.
Money could have been better spent?
Well, it always can be, can’t it? But you won't find Seafarer among the whingers, the puritans, the chattering sophisticates and cynics. Thank Heseltine, Mandelson, Blair, whoever, it really was “one amazing day”.
Faith without works xcept... yes, except for the Faith Zone. Originally planned as an open, inclusive celebration of the human spirit (when it was to be called the Spirit Zone), this has withered under the dead hand of the Church into a lifeless exhibition extolling the virtues of institutional Christianity, with passing nods at other religions.
Where the other Zones used the most up-to-date technology to convey the message, the Faith Zone was content to stick mini-sermons and quotes on walls, like a 1950s church hall missionary day.
The dull old men of Lambeth had ensured that Churchianity would get pride of place and that other religions would mostly be relegated to displays on the pillars between the walls, as if the sponsors had rather wished they didn’t have to be there, but as they were it was best to be nice to them. (The one positive exception was the wall called “Faith in the Future” - yes, they pinched that from this year’s SoF conference theme - which displayed the Golden Rule as it appears in a,dozen different scriptures and traditions.) The Church’s own story was told with a careful avoidance of anything as dangerous as imagination or historical honesty. The uninspired clerics behind these displays had never heard of biblical criticism or historical rigour, or if they had they didn’t let on. The result was Sunday School for half-grownups.
Above all, there was not a glimmer of recognition that “faith” and spiritual values transcend religion and the old dogmatic, supernaturalist frameworks.
Nothing left, that is, of the vision which inspired the idea of the Zone in the first place. Michael Grade was heard on one of those making-of-the-Dome tv programmes pleading that the Zone shouldn’t become a sink estate for Janet and John religion. But that’s exactly what the uninspired, uninspiring old codgers of the Lambeth Committee made of it - except there wasn’t even much Janet.