Word: tussaud
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...considered properly popular unless he is admitted to the company of Madame Tussaud's celebrities," the attraction's eponymous founder, the French-born Marie Tussaud told the British periodical Punch in 1849. But she couldn't resist including a smattering of unpopular characters, too. The so-called Chamber of Horrors still displays an anonymous Sans-Culottes standing close to the decapitated heads of some of the French Revolution's aristocratic victims. Nearby a lifeless Jean-Paul Marat bleeds into his bath...
...Tussaud's imparts a lesson to the schoolkids and tourists who tramp through its labyrinthine exhibits, it's about the pre-eminence of pop culture, and the random nature - and transience - of fame. Hollywood A-listers, sports people and British royals hog the limelight. There are 400-odd figures on show, but all scientific endeavor is represented by Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and TIME's Person of the Century, Albert Einstein, who share a small annex with Vincent Van Gogh, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. In the dim light of the first gallery...
...Democratic politics provides a challenge to Tussaud's. Angela Merkel, elected German Chancellor in 2005, has been sculpted, but her figure is briefly on loan to Berlin. Her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, remains by popular demand. John Howard and Vladimir Putin make an unlikely, and dated, duo. Their successors, Kevin Rudd and Dmitri Medvedev, have not yet been commissioned, but are "very much on our radar," says Lovett...
...course, have greater staying power. Ivy Jerrier from Durban in South Africa spots Zimbabwe's despotic leader Robert Mugabe sitting next to Fidel Castro. "I don't want a picture with him," she exclaims, then changes her mind and strikes a pose with her hands around his throat. Tussaud's dispensed with rope barriers five years...
...Brown joins this motley crew - and chances are he will (Tussaud's has been rebuffed only once in its history by a would-be subject, and that was Mother Teresa) - he can expect to be poked, prodded, kissed and possibly abused. In a world where fame is valued more highly than respect and pop stars take precedence over playwrights, it's an opportunity not to be missed...