Since we can’t receive BBC2 in the Netherlands (and because I am crossing Europe by train at the moment), I wasn’t able to watch the first episode of The Museum: the 10-part BBC TV series about the British Museum that started last friday. Unfortunately neither the BBC nore the museum itself is offering the possibility to (re)watch this series that gives viewers a peek behind the scenes of one of the world’s great museums. Interested people who live outside the UK, like myself, therefore will have to wait for a release on DVD or for their national broadcasting corporations to buy and show the series. This is a missed opportunity for a selfproclaimed ‘universal museum’ and something that a global media organisation simply can’t sustain. Especially since the first episode got a positive feedback from both the official media and several bloggers.

In the Guardian, TV critic Sam Wollaston described the staff members of the museum that appeared on the programme as “real enthusiasts, unperturbed by the modern world, doing their thing, immersed in the past, year after year”. He seemed a bit disappointed that the BBC wasn’t going “behind the scenes of a busy restaurant, into a steamy kitchen full of sexy young people swearing at each other”, but his overall opinion was fairly possitive. John Anson, another journalist from the Lancashire Telegraph, hesitantly admitted that there was “something almost mesmerising watching art restorer Karen who has spent six years of her life working on an Egyptian wall painting”. One blogger predicts a successful continuation of this insiders’ guide to the mother of all museums and says that by “portraying it as unstuffy and ‘normal’ as possible the BBC may have a small ‘hit’ on its hands”.

Hopefully this broad support from British viewers will persuade the BBC to make the series more widely accessible (online). That might also help Neil MacGregor, director of the museum, to convince an international audience of the museum’s universal reach and legitimacy. If I was living in Athens, Cairo or Baghdad at the moment, it would probably make a big difference if I could watch the people who are taking care of my national cultural heritage as they perform their daily duties. Perhaps the BBC and the British Museum eventually even could collaborate with other museums who share the same difficulties in reaching the moral heirs of their collections. And if the BBC refuses to participate the museums can always team up with Al-Jazeera.

Go to website The British Museum
Read what the Guardian has to say about The Museum
Read an interview with Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum (The Sunday Times, May 6, 2007)

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The Times reports that one of the world’s most important collections of human remains has been lost to science, after the Natural History Museum gave up the specimens without first carrying out work that would have preserved vital clues to evolution. Bones and teeth from 17 Tasmanian Aborigines were handed over to a community group yesterday, after the museum dropped plans for a final research programme.

Read full article (The Times, May 12, 2007)
Go to website Natural History Museum