Rupert Murdoch, Steven Spielberg, General Pinochet, rock 'n' roll visionaries, grandees on yachts with lackeys... all had a role to play in the great Dome circus

Stephen Bayley, a style guru, witty, contemptuous, candid, intemperate, epigrammatic and unkind by turn, had created and run both the Boilerhouse Project at the V&A and the Design Museum on the bank of the Thames opposite the Tower of London. He was a consultant to Ford, knew a great deal about design history and had for many years worked for Sir Terence Conran. In June 1997 Bill Muirhead at M&C Saatchi, the advertising agency advising the Dome, had suggested Bayley's name to Jennie Page as someone who would be able to oversee the look and style of the Dome's contents.
It was acknowledged by design writers on both sides of the Atlantic that Bayley would add real stature to the project. That month he was duly made 'consultant creative director'.
Because he needed to keep the rest of his business going, he was only part-time on the Dome - three days a week, for which he was to be paid £80,000 a year. He would not work in the Dome's offices in Buckingham Palace Road. Bayley thought they had 'the feng shui to kill a rhinoceros'. This literal standoffishness was matched by a culture gap between him and the New Millennium Experience Company team. They saw him as disengaged, dilettante-ish and arrogant. He saw them as excluding, suspicious, uninspired and without the necessary experience and scope.
'It was absolutely mad to have taken the job,' Bayley now says. 'They simply wanted to say they had a creative director. They didn't actually want one. I'm not much given to collective activity. I have no taste for politics, committees and meetings. I made that absolutely clear. If you want strong ideas, I will give you strong ideas. But I will not do committees, I will not do meetings and I am not interested in discussing things with other people.'
Why did NMEC want him? It was well known that Bayley was congenitally incapable of staying on-message and that his team-playing skills were rudimentary. 'It was a high-risk hiring,' Page now says. 'We all accepted it might not work and we discussed that right at the beginning. He was always on try-out. But the team needed strengthening. We needed more people. I needed to get hold of people, fast, who were high quality, available, resourceful, relevant and with enough reputation and clout to add substance to the company.'
The difficulty soon peaked. It was not, as Bayley would later describe it, about his relationship with Mandelson. He scarcely met Mandelson and, although towards the end of Bayley's time with NMEC Mandelson would become increasingly enraged by what he saw as Bayley's 'inability to offer any realistic ideas of his own', the conflict was in many ways more important than that. The clash of personality between Bayley and the Dome's content team became a vehicle for a more essential difference in view. He was adamant that they shouldn't go to the London-based community of architects, event and show designers. They should aim higher than that. 'With a very few exceptions,' Bayley would write in 1998, 'the quality of the firms expressing interest [was] very low; Europe's great architects and designers almost entirely ignored the invitation. My immediate suggestion that we re-advertise and coerce entries from the best designers was also ignored.'
There was another point of difference: in the summer of 1997 Bayley suggested that NMEC should pause for six months, look at its ideas and make them deep and strong. 'Call me old-fashioned, call me academic - I am basically an academic type, I'm a sort of groovy academic - but that's how you do an exhibition. You do what the Financial Times always used to tell its journalists: simplify and then exaggerate. To do something about the mind you have to get people who know about the mind to write a fantastic account of what matters about the mind, and then you give it to someone like me who knows about exhibitions to write an exhibition brief and then you give it to a designer. You don't go to a designer and say: "Do me something about the mind, please."'
NMEC felt that there was a lack of realism in what Bayley said. The atmosphere in the company at the time was one of deep anxiety; they were coming under ferocious pressure from Mandelson to deliver on sponsorship and on ideas for content (no sponsors would sponsor anything until they knew what it might look like). Mandelson himself was privately going through agonies of doubt over what he had committed the government to. Blair was making it perfectly clear that Mandelson would be taking the blame if it went wrong. Blair himself was anxious about it. The press was becoming increasingly hostile. In such an environment it seemed to NMEC and the politicians that Bayley's suggestion that they spend six months thinking about the content was insouciant and out of touch to the point of puerility. Bayley remained adamant that it was not. 'Six months was what any responsible professional with relevant experience would have insisted on.' Mandelson's own disdain for Bayley was not concealed.
By the late summer of 1997 Bayley was already on the sidelines, 'paring his nails', 'looking at the ceiling during meetings', 'never pulling his chair up to the table', or 'occasionally pontificating', depending on which member of NMEC you asked. Claire Sampson, the Dome's production director, and Martin Newman, one of its content editors, desperately busy, drove ahead with their scheme for briefing the designers. Having followed the usual advertising process, they chose 22 design, event and architecture practices and invited them to a meeting on 5 August. The companies would be asked to submit suggestions: two zones for each of the bigger concerns, one each for the smaller. They were to be paid £5,000 per zone for their efforts and NMEC was to retain intellectual property rights in everything submitted.
They came in two groups, and Sampson spoke to them. What they produced, she told them, should be educational, fun, inspirational and communal in effect. NMEC was looking for richness and variety. Schemes should attend to the needs of those who couldn't speak English, were disabled or were very young. Everything should be for everybody. And this, she said to the designers in the room, 'is your opportunity to do whatever you like. Anything creative, innovative or interesting, this is your chance! And we don't want a vase of cut flowers. We don't want something that will look pretty but will fade. We want plants that will take root in people's minds.'
The briefs given to each company imposed nothing and dictated nothing. The idea, according to Jennie Page, 'was to stimulate the designers, to test how they would respond, to see if they were adaptable. It was not a form of intellectual self-abnegation but it was anti-didactic. It was deliberately done, precisely so that we did not impose on the exhibition a kind of stiffness and decisiveness too early, which could have prejudiced the entire show.'
Michael Grade, who had been recruited by Peter Mandelson, was adamant that this was not cynical old 'business as usual': 'In 1851 [the Great Exhibition] and 1951 [the Festival of Britain] the great and the good created wonderful tableaux, then lifted the curtain and allowed the great unwashed to have a peep at how great their leaders were. This show is different. Here it is the people themselves who are the focus. It says: "Think about your own life." The people are in charge. What the Dome is saying to them is: "Here you are, folks. Here are the choices. You decide." That is a radical difference.'
A guiding force in the shaping of this philosophy was Claire Sampson. In a sometimes Jurassic NMEC environment, where big, craggy beasts slogged it out over meeting-room tables, Sampson had a different kind of presence. She had trained as a dancer, spent a great deal of time in the United States, had put on rock shows and run arts organisations. Calm; a natural and understated sense of authority; familiarity with the workings of a budget; an acute visual sense; an ability to focus on the project; balance; flexibility in a task which had little precedent; a consistently team-building and solution-seeking attitude; gentleness and subtlety, with enough toughness not to be kicked around by the bullish figures of some of the other NMEC on-site directors: these are some of the invaluable if unexpected qualities that Claire Sampson brought to her job. It occupied in many ways the most crucial node in the organisation.
The questions put to the designers were generic in the extreme: for the Body: 'Are we what we eat? Are there still seven ages of man? Can we feed the world? What about designer people?' For the Soul: 'What is the meaning of Life? Should we defend the faiths? Is God dead? Can science find Him? Or Her?' For Work: 'Does business matter if I am not a millionaire? How will technology change my life? How will I meet people?' For Play: 'What will be art? Will novels cease to exist? Can there be any new ideas?' And so on.
It was little more than a blank sheet, attached to some operational requirements: a capacity for 5,000 people an hour through each zone, a completion date of November 1999 and a budget per zone. Designers were not to give a moment's thought to sponsorship but 'to concentrate on the issues as you see them'.
Sampson and Newman had been joined by Ben Evans, who had worked with Jennie Page at English Heritage, and was now dropped into NMEC by Peter Mandelson. He was to be a conduit on creative content between the shareholder and the company. Everybody's relationships with Bayley were worsening. People were offended by his apparent assumption that everyone was stupid. Newman felt that there was a school of narrative designers in Britain who could, more effectively than anyone else in the world, take a skeletal idea and make of it something new and exciting. There was no need for a string of 'curator-heroes' - in the Bayley mould - to preordain what the designers might do.
It was an irreconcilable difference, to be resolved only in the outcome. Would the people in whom NMEC was putting its faith deliver? The answer to that question would be long and complex.
The year came to an end with an episode of pure and painful farce. Mandelson had been intending to visit the Disney organisation in Florida the previous September. The visit was cancelled at the last moment because Diana, Princess of Wales, died four days before he was due to go there. In December the Select Committee criticised NMEC and Mandelson for not studying the example of Disney. So he rescheduled the trip for the few days after Christmas. He was in America on holiday anyway and was due in Washington to prepare for Blair's visit to the White House.
A newspaper got hold of the story; at the same time Bayley, in an interview with The Telegraph, was committing his one last act of indiscretion. 'What relevance will the Dome have to someone from, say, Aberdeen?' the reporter asked him. Bayley said: 'I dare say there is some knuckle-dragging Neanderthal there who won't be disposed to being entertained and stimulated by aesthetically interesting ideas.'
Bayley's interview - which marked the end of his involvement with the Dome - formed the background to Mandelson's visit to Disney World, where he was pursued by photographers trying to catch him with Mickey.
'I had to grin and bear it. It was horrible. There is nothing in the world more godawful than someone trying to make you stand next to Mickey Mouse.' He could only hope that 1998 would be better.
It is difficult to overestimate the tension and strain which the project was imposing on the people involved - and on none more than Peter Mandelson and Jennie Page. Both were desperate for the Dome to happen. 'I fought for it, was identified with it and walked through fire for it,' Mandelson says. Page could use precisely the same words. Mandelson goes on:
'I believed in it. Inside the Dome, it was high-octane anxiety and stress. I don't remember a period when it was painless. And I protected it. But if I was to take the flak, I had to know what was happening. No surprises!'
Mandelson 'wanted a governing mind, a creative mind, the sort of person in an election campaign who could carry it all in his head.' And in late 1997 and early 1998 an enormous battle raged over this need for what was variously called a 'creative guru', a 'ringmaster' and a 'maestro' to sit alongside Jennie Page. By now she was clearly under almost intolerable strain.
At least the ringmaster would take control of the creative elements of the process. The sort of figure needed was someone of real prominence, who could stand up for the project in the country and generate confidence among outsiders.
Mandelson had lunch with Alan Yentob. He couldn't do it because it would put him out of the running for the director-generalship of the BBC. Michael Grade had his business at First Leisure to run. David Puttnam was busy as a Labour politician. Steven Spielberg was asked. Others, less prominent, were interviewed by Page, chewed up and spat out as unsatisfactory. Mandelson found himself in a curious position. Internally, no one was advocating the appointment of such a figure more forcefully than him, but such a figure could not be found. He had to stand up in public and defend the lack of the very thing he most wanted for the project.
'There is no hero for this,' Page says. 'This is about a whole load of people shoving together. This is about a team pulling together. How often do I have to say that?' Simon Jenkins gave Page a phrase to use against those pushing her to find the great genius. 'I can't see an elephant in this haystack,' she would say. 'Show me an elephant and I'll employ it.'
In January 1997 Ken Robinson, the dome's operations director and one of the country's leading experts in running visitor attractions, went on holiday to the Galapagos. On the same yacht ('a very upmarket thing with lackeys,' in Robinson's words) was George Russell, chairman of Camelot, the Lottery operators. Over dinner Robinson suggested that the Dome's pre-booked tickets, the biggest ticketing exercise ever conducted, should be sold through Camelot's high-street Lottery outlets. 'Your licence will be coming up in 2000,' Robinson taunted him. 'It will be a jolly good thing for you to do.' As a result, that is precisely how most Dome tickets will be sold.
In November 1997 Mark Fisher, an architect of spectacular rock shows, was asked to design something for the Dome. Fisher had been in California with the Rolling Stones. Now he was driving around the American West, 'visiting old Pink Floyd covers'. He had reached Furnace Creek Ranch, opposite Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, when he got the summons by e-mail from Freud. Fisher rang Freud. Freud said, 'We're repositioning the Dome.'
For Fisher, 'it was the phone call I had been waiting for. But politicians don't go to pop concerts, do they? They go to musicals. And no one ever got sacked for buying IBM.' Within a matter of days he was back in England, had seen Michael Grade, Matthew Freud, Jennie Page and Peter Mandelson and was soon being wheeled on to the Co-ordinating Group, of which Michael Heseltine and Simon Jenkins were members. Fisher, in suit and tie for the occasion, made his early pitch. The idea was a cross between Cirque de Soleil and a rock concert. It would be a collaboration with someone like Peter Gabriel (of Genesis) or David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), a multicultural experience, in daylight, high-risk.
In this first version of his show different groups of people would, one after another, reach for the heights of the enormous space in which the show was to be performed. Politicians would promise everything and deliver nothing. Scientists, all distorted rationality, would get in a muddle and their tower would head off at an angle. Only the third group - of ordinary people, cooperating with each other - would make it to the apex of the Dome.
The man who catapulted U2 on to the stage in a 15-metre-high rotating lemon, who designedTina Turner's 1996 Wildest Dreams tour and Janet Jackson's 1998 Velvet Rope tour, whose Bridges to Babylon set for the Rolling Stones re-enacted the history and/or end of civilisation, confronted the ex-deputy prime minister and the ex-editor of The Times. Jenkins liked Fisher's suggestion for its classical three-act structure and its allusions to the manner of the Wakefield mystery plays. Heseltine said, 'More people would burst into tears if a band of the Royal Marines marched across the arena than anyone ever would for your show.'
'Yes,' said Fisher, 'but not for the reasons you think.'
Despite Heseltine's doubts, Fisher was on. His scheme, in collaboration with Peter Gabriel, would over the next two years evolve into an astonishing millennial-operatic, eco-poetic, romantico-historic rock-carnival-fantasy for which there was little precedent in any of the artistic realms on which it drew.
Rupert Murdoch had been in regular contact with Tony Blair. A suggestion that Sky should put a dish in every school had turned out not to be viable. The question of the Dome now came up.
Matthew Freud, a member of the Dome's executive committee and at that time, as he puts it, 'not yet officially going out' with Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth, then general manager (broadcasting) for BSkyB, 'talked to Liz about it and then had a few minutes with Murdoch in LA'. He sold the Dome to them both, pitching it as something the television company should naturally be involved with. Sky was all about entertainment and leisure. The Dome was interested in those things too. The sponsorship required - £12 million - was not something to frighten Murdoch.
Elisabeth Murdoch took the project on and championed it within Sky. She immediately saw the benefits it could bring the company and arranged a meeting in the Cabinet Office with Page and Mandelson. Mark Booth, then managing director of BSkyB, into whose lap this scheme had been fairly abruptly dropped, and Andrea Sullivan, who would be in charge of the project, came from Sky. It was 'an easy handshake,' Sullivan says.
The Sun had been consistently hostile to the Dome. On 12 January 1998, for example, the Sun had said: 'This waste of public money [should] be axed, for that's what public opinion wants... that damned Dome has disaster written all over it.' On 17 February it thought the Dome 'has all the makings of the biggest white elephant of this or any other century... What a terrible monument to the human ego.' On 22 February Freud rang the paper. 'You may be interested to know...' he said to Rebekah Wade, the deputy editor. 'Oh, f-,' she said. For Freud it was 'the nicest call I ever made'. The next day, after the Freud call, the paper, admitting it had been the 'fiercest critic', now thought: 'There is beginning to be an air of excitement about the Millennium Experience... Griping about it will achieve nothing. Instead we should all get behind it and ensure its success.'
At the suggestion of matthew freud and after the usual hiring process had been followed, Sholto Douglas-Home, in charge of advertising and public relations at BT, joined NMEC. He met the company culture in full flow. Jennie Page gave him an astringent interview. Douglas-Home mentioned 'the new century' as something to think about. Page said, 'New century? What do you mean new century? It's the new millennium we are meant to be thinking about here.'
Then he met Mandelson. 'There are four things that have got to be done,' the minister told him. 'We have got to build it and someone's doing that very well. We've got to get the sponsorship and that is coming along nicely. We've got to define the content, which is Jennie's job. And someone has got to sell 12 million tickets, and that's your job. Your job is to make the world come to the Dome.'
Flattering, attentive, challenging, nurturing: this was a side to Mandelson which he had failed to communicate to the public. 'Do you run or go to the gym?' he asked Douglas-Home.
'I used to be a sprinter but I can't stand long-distance running,' the Dome's new marketing director said, on slightly unfamiliar territory.
'Oh, you should. You're in your mid-thirties. You have got to keep fit.'
'I do, but sometimes I creak in the mornings.'
'Creak in the mornings? That's worrying,' Mandelson said. 'You should see someone about it.'
Douglas-Home joined NMEC on 1 September 1998. He had three weeks in which to present a new marketing strategy to the Dome's executive committee, chaired by the powerful and no-frills figure of Sam Chisholm. The year before, when a previous advertising campaign had been presented, Chisholm and Freud had lacerated Kevin Johnson, then the Dome's commercial and marketing director. It had been a bloodbath. Douglas-Home knew the history. This time, Chisholm began, 'Don't give me charts. I just want it straight.'
Douglas-Home outlined his thinking. NMEC needed to 'own the millennium'. They needed to establish their brand, to make a statement of what they were. Some of their sponsors had started to do things and NMEC wasn't doing anything. Sponsors were starting to ask, 'When are you going to get going?' There was a media expectation. And, internally, morale had been 'carved back' by the way in which the Dome had been treated over the previous 18 months. NMEC was 'entrenched, hunkered down. It needed a lift.'
As Douglas-Home finished his presentation, there was a long pause. Chisholm turned to Freud. 'Sounds OK. Matthew, what do you think?' Freud: 'On the button.' No one else said a word. Chisholm said, 'Sholto, you're a f-ing adornment.' Douglas-Home said, 'Thank you,' and left the room.
The strategy was brilliant and simple. With just 12 months to go, people's expectations about the millennium itself - not about the Dome or NMEC's national programme - needed heightening. Simon Dicketts at M&C Saatchi drafted the script of an advertisement to be set on Easter Island. The mystery and sheer antiquity of those stone heads, their easy reach into the distant past, would bring poetry and depth to the idea of the millennium which the press coverage had almost completely eroded in people's minds. Allied to a sense of the future, and to the idea of personal involvement in what it might be, the advertisement would be a way of setting the millennium firmly on track.
Easter Island belongs to Chile. Three days after the go-ahead was given for the ad General Pinochet was arrested in London and there were anti-British riots in Santiago. Private communications between the Foreign Office and the Chilean embassy reassured everyone that the Chilean government would do all it could to make life easy for the film crew. In this Pinochet was a side-issue. The appearance of Easter Island on British television in connection with the millennium was important. The 60-second film was made.
The imagery was beautiful, the script, read by Jeremy Irons, touching, funny, wondering whether the discovery of the sandwich and the bringing of the potato to Europe were two of the great historical moments of the last millennium.
When it was first shown to NMEC staff in their offices that December, they stood with tears in their eyes. It was difficult at times to remember what this was all for. The advertisement was a reminder. Peter Mandelson, who had acutely and subtly analysed the script and approach of the film when it was first presented to him, now fell from office. Just before Christmas, as the news broke of a secret loan from Geoffrey Robinson and Mandelson was forced to resign from the government and from his position as shareholder of the Dome, the Easter Island advertisement was broadcast on prime-time TV. The sun came up over the eastern Pacific, with the invitation: 'Imagine what we can do tomorrow.'
There was one other player in this tussle who could not be ignored. The figure Sam Chisholm calls 'Joe Sixpack, Fred Public, whatever you want to call him'. He was going to have contributed £600 million to the exhibition, either though buying Lottery tickets or by paying at the door. Was he going to be happy here? During the early months of 1999 a recurrent anxiety about the Dome surfaced again. Was it balanced enough? Was there enough for the 'paddler, the swimmer and the diver'? Was there sufficient 'wow'?
Matthew Freud felt that the core team at NMEC was too highbrow. 'The important question to ask was: are you telling stories that are only available to people who have been to university? What newspaper is this? That's what you had to ask. The majority of what was in there at the time was the Guardian and the Independent. A minority dropped to the Mail and the Express. There wasn't a red top amongst them. And as I said to them all, and as Michael Grade was saying and Bob Ayling was saying and Sam Chisholm was saying, if you are going to cut off anyone, cut the top off.' Freud thought the Dome a haven for intellectual architecture-groupies. 'Anyone who subscribed to Blueprint,' he said, 'all 8,500 of them, were going to have the greatest day of their lives.' At one meeting Freud 'mentioned the name of a man who had been the producer of Noel's House Party and the reaction was as if I'd crapped on the floor.'
'Bums on seats', in Michael Grade's phrase, or, in the words of Lord Falconer (Minister of State in the Cabinet Office, Mandelson's successor as Dome shareholder, and Blair's friend and fixer), 'numbers who come', was always going to be the first measure of success. Critical acclaim came a good second. The business plan was based around a figure of 12 million visitors and the last four months of the Dome's operation in 2000 were dependent on having acquired the ticket income earlier in the year. If visitors didn't come in those first eight months, the Dome would be looking at a revenue shortfall it couldn't sustain. The figures started to go wrong financially under nine million. For the shareholder, 'Hitting that target will be OK. Above it will be success.'
At the suggestion of Michael Grade, an effort was made at the beginning of 1999 to bring in a set of producers from film, television and the world of commercials; they were invited to examine four of the zones which seemed to be having most difficulty in delivering a bright, accessible, non-intellectualised product. Two soon dropped out, deciding that the Dome was too different from what they normally did. A third remained to work on the innards of the Body.
By April, still pushing on the same tender spot, Lord Falconer decided that the Dome needed 'a populism audit', a measure of how much the contents of the Dome would be accessible to all. He, as much as any of them, was struggling with the notions of balance, inclusiveness, fun and a longer-lasting quality which went beyond mere entertainment. 'You want some sense that people thought it was worthwhile, that people thought the contents both good and worth coming to see. But there's lots of it. There are bits to score on a culture basis and bits to score on an entertainment basis.'
Where did Lord Falconer stand on the Reithian question? How much did the Dome have a mission to explain, to spread civilisation to the masses? 'I don't suspect that my children would have found a Reithian BBC that appealing,' he said in early May. 'But definitely you do want Reithian in the sense that you want to explain high culture in an easy way but you want as well straightforwardly populist elements. Twelve million people is not 12 million Brian Sewells.'
But what was the impetus behind the populism audit? Was the implication of the audit that the contents weren't populist enough?
'No,' he said, 'and the reason it is a "no" is that the contents are in the process of being put together.
I don't want to quibble but the contents aren't anything. They are not complete.' Because the contents did not yet exist in a finished form, they could not be assigned a quality of any kind, populist or not populist. They were, technically speaking, non-existent.
If this was something of a lawyer's answer, Michael Grade had a ready explanation. 'We are at a point in the project now where there is a lot of nervousness,' he said. 'The shareholder needs reassurance. "Is there something I should be doing?" It is the question everybody asks at this stage. Everyone is insecure. Christ, we don't half need an audience.'
©The Daily Telegraph 1999