Every time I drive past Madame Tussauds I marvel at the queues outside. Marvel and despair. This is, to my mind, a monstrous diddle meted out upon poor tourists who, I assume, once they’ve seen what’s inside, vow never to come to Britain again. So I approached Madame Tussauds: The Full Wax (ITV), a programme that couldn’t even manage a decent pun in the title (I’d have gone for the simpler “Why?”) with something close to utter dread.
In fact, I’d say that an hour in the company of this behind-the-scenes documentary was time considerably better spent than actually visiting Madame Tussauds (£30.50 in advance, or more than 40 Caramel Magnums).
It was one of those never-seen-before unrivalled-access jobs that as any fool must know by now, are actually a tussle between a film-maker who wants to show warts and all and a commercial PR department who want a puff piece. Filmed across a year at the London and Blackpool locations, the film followed the creation and launch of new wax figures for the pop stars Little Mix and the YouTube gamer DanTDM.
We learnt about the real “virgin” human hair used to create Jade Thirwall’s real human hair, with each strand individually inserted over a five-week period. We saw how an exact replica of DanTDM’s gaming room was created as a home for his wax doppelgänger – and how Dan reacted to meeting his twin for the first time. (“Freaky”). And if that were all, reader, we would have switched off after the first ad break.
