January 23, 2025

Straight off the Dome ft. Imogen West-Knights

59 minutes

Roll-up, roll-up for the biggest tent of all! We’re launching into 2025 with a very special guest, Imogen West-Knights, and an absolutely vast cursed object, containing lots of smaller ones. That’s right, we’re turning the clock back a full quarter of a century to revisit the universal mockery, dodgy sponsors, New Labour hubris, sweet childhood memories, general hilarity, bomb threats and national self-loathing that all came messily, hilariously together to fill the Millennium Dome.

At the time, it was viewed as the white elephant that would stomp over all other white elephants, the most embarrassing of political failures – but Imogen’s obsessive reporting on the Dome’s history has turned up a more interesting verdict altogether. Was this the ultimate symbol of the early Blair years, for better and worse? What was the Dome Minister’s deep connection to the 1951 Festival of Britain? What was it actually like to visit the Dome as a child in 2000? Should we all be a bit less cynical about massive projects like this? Just how tacky was it in the end? And what was the true spirit of the Willennium - sorry, millennium?

Thanks so much to the brilliant Imogen West-Knights for sharing her worrying level of expertise on the Dome with us – you can read her 2020 Guardian Long Read on the Dome here. And buy her excellent debut novel Deep Down here. She is on BlueSky @ImogenWK.

Big thanks to Cursed Objects listener Tilly Hawkins for also suggesting the 'Been there, DOME that' badge for our upcoming installation at the Peltz, and to H.O.M.E for providing a studio - check them out if you're a creative looking for a space to work in London.

Theme music: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

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