I like reading and watching reviews. I really appreciate good reviews of good stuff but for sheer entertainment value you really can’t beat an extremely well constructed bad review of something that is genuinely bad.
The historian Dr Mark Felton has come up with an absolutely fabulous bad review of an attraction, Buckingham Palace, which is well worth the time it takes to listen to it as it contains some absolute corkers about his and his wife’s experience of visiting the Palace. There are some brilliant gems here such as his description of the staff as having ‘faces like a smacked arse’ and ‘Gestapo’ qualities. He slags off the toilet facilities, the venality of the palace tours which cram as many people as possible into each tour tranche, the piss poor and expensive food and drink and the lack of cleanliness in the cafe. At one point Dr Felton mused that the Buckingham Palace tours are so bad that they help to turn monarchists into republicans and reassure American visitors that their ancestors did the right thing in 1776.
Please give this video a go as it is an object lesson on how to do a justifiably bad review.
An excellent Bad Review! I had the misfortune to accompany my father to the Palace when he received an honour about twenty years ago. While I was proud for him and his honour, I was taken aback at how grubby the place was – stained carpets, missing lightbulbs, peeling (very expensive) wallpaper. On that occasion (as a “guest”) we were allowed to use the internal toilets – there was no paper, and the taps dripped. No hot water, either…. The staff were perfunctory, verging on rude, and I was left with the feeling that we were all just a bloody nuisance. It was all rather sad….
I believe the late Queen was parsimonious when it came to spending money on BP. I can understand why to a certain extent as splurging money on BP might not have played well as PR. However it is a working govt building rather than a museum and it’s going to have some wear and tear. However that doesn’t excuse the behaviour of staff towards visitors and guests. For visitors to the palace who’ve spent considerable sums to be able to visit to be treated as Dr Felton says is utterly and completely wrong, it gives a terrible impression to both Britons and foreign visitors.
What a middle class tart. “naff orf” indeed