Dan Dare – “Pilot of the Future” – was the best known of the strips in the comic Eagle, which was published in the UK between 1950 and 1969. First drawn by Frank Hampson, Colonel Dare travelled throughout space in his personal spaceship, fighting his arch enemy the Mekon, ruler of the Treens, in amazing futuristic landscapes. Alongside Dan Dare Eagle also featured “cutaways”, detailed drawings of a piece of the latest British technology. Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain at London’s Science Museum aims to explore how the country tried to reinvent itself in the post-war period to 1970. Unfortunately Dan Dare disappears from the scene early on, and the rather uneven content might leave visitors wonder why they shouldn’t go to see the Museum’s other technological exhibition, Making the Modern World, instead.
Visitors are introduced to Dan Dare in a huge room overlooking Exhibition Road on one side and a void in the centre of the Museum on the other. The windows are covered by blinds printed with scenes from Dan Dare stories, and suspended in the void is a Bristol Bloodhound anti-aircraft missile. This is surely a scene to excite all those visitors who read Eagle as a child. Text panels tell us a little bit about the history of the magazine and its creators. Display cabinets house original Dan Dare storyboards, drawings and memorabilia. Over by the missile is a reproduction of one of Eagle’s cutaways explaining the technology involved.
But it isn’t clear how Dan Dare or Eagle are going to guide us through the rest of the exhibition. The exhibition explores post-war British technology up to 1970, but doesn’t include the architecture influenced by Hampson’s landscapes, and the cutaways get only the briefest of mentions in this room. But as it turns out, with the exception of this first room Dan Dare isn’t mentioned at all.
From here visitors have a choice of what to see next. The exhibition is wrapped around three sides of the rectangular central void, with the introductory room on a short side and the other two sections on each of the long sides. Take the right hand exit from the first room and you can see Building A New Britain, take the left had exit and see Reinventing the Home.
Building a New Britain explores how Britain “set out to reinvent itself as hi-tech nation.” Divided into four sections, it examines themes such as health, industry, transport and the military. The exhibits in each section are densely packed. There are large-scale objects from dentists’ chairs to coal cutters and cars, as well as arrays of smaller items like hearing aids and NHS glasses. The objects are almost too dense: they feel crammed against the wall, hidden behind a barrier of text and graphics which tries not only to given stories behind each object, but also to contextualise them as well. Individually, the objects are really interesting and have many stories to tell. But packed together like this, without the chance to examine each on its own, it is easy to feel overwhelmed; there’s no break from the objects, graphics or text and it’s difficult to take it all in.
The contextualisation is a little tricky, too. Although the text panels briefly acknowledge the post-war social contexts that were relevant to many of the developments on display, the over-arching tone is one of technological advance solving all problems. So for example, at one point the halving of child mortality and routine immunisation seem to be portrayed as the result of new technologies, without the role of the newly formed NHS being fully explained.
The Science Museum is trying out some of its own new technology in the exhibition, and it’s in this part that visitors can test the mobile phone audio tour. By dialling a UK landline number followed by a three-digit code given on the text panels, visitors can hear a commentary about certain objects. The commentaries start with a dramatic scenario featuring the object, and then go on to give historical information. They’re fun, though they might not satisfy those who want serious, detailed, historical information. The mobile phone audio tour is a neat idea as it’s cheaper and easier than an audio guide – provided that you have a UK mobile phone and speak English. Perhaps in future the service will be expanded to offer cheap rate calls for overseas visitors and a choice of languages.
At the end of Building a New Britain, the awkwardness of the U-shaped space comes to the fore. To get to Reinventing the Home, visitors have either to retrace their steps or wade through a section of the Energy Gallery. Taking the latter option, visitors first encounter a bank of computers testing another new Science Museum technology. This one’s to do with the Ingenious website and the Object Wiki, though it isn’t clear what these are or how they relate to the exhibition. However it is quite possible that the terminals are there to fill space because if Building a New Britain felt overcrowded with objects, this section is almost deserted. It seems rather bizarre that the Science Museum doesn’t have many objects to illustrate post-war domestic technology, even if the story is the failure of British manufacturing to respond to more sophisticated foreign competitors. But then again, perhaps they are all in Making the Modern World?
Two floors below Dan Dare, Making the Modern World is a large permanent exhibition of objects that represent key technological developments in health, industry, transport and the home… Granted, this is more international in scope and over an extended period of time, but it clearly demonstrates that the museum has these objects in its collections, so why not show more of them here?
Dan Dare is a strange exhibition: one that doesn’t quite use a famous cartoon character to present rather uneven content that is in danger of being outshone by another exhibition. The themes are interesting, and the using new technology for interpretation is a great idea, but the exhibition doesn’t live up to its promise.
Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain was at the Science Museum, London in spring 2008.
A version of this article first appeared in Museums Journal in 2008.
Rachel Souhami 