4 JULY 1998, Page 13

ONLY BETTER THAN HANOVER

Mark Honigsbaum on the millennium celebrations abroad that will make Greenwich look like a mean time WITH only 555 days left before the dawn of the new millennium, I am beginning to feel just a little sorry for Peter Mandelson, Labour's self-appointed Minister for the Dome. Yes, I know he walked straight into the trap laid for him by Michael Heseltine and has no one to blame but himself, but how would you feel if, like Mr Mandelson, you were now committed to seeing in the 21st century at a former gas-works site in Greenwich? Not even Mr Mandelson's cheesiest, most publicity-wooing grin can disguise this being a depressing prospect indeed — particularly now that the Prime Minister has made his task even more diffi- cult by promising that the Greenwich Dome will be 'the greatest day out on Earth'.

As anyone who has cast an eye over the other millennium celebrations being planned around the globe knows, this is a very rash commitment by the Prime Minis- ter and one that his top spin doctor really ought to have warned him against. It's not that Greenwich won't at the end of the day be a jolly good bash — if nothing else, the £758 million being spent on the project will ensure that. It's just that there are so many jollier, not to mention sunnier, locations in which to welcome the third millennium, and many of them are planning pretty big bashes of their own.

There were Anglo-Sax-on smirks all round when the French ,announced plans to celebrate the millennium by having the Eiffel Tower lay an egg containing hun- dreds of television screens at the stroke of midnight — 'the Paris 200 organisers have given birth to a turkey,' is how the Times's critic put it. But following the World Cup opening ceremony, that laughter is begin- ning to sound a little hollow. Who knows what those giant multicoloured robots on the Champs Elysees were meant to symbol- ise and who cares? Just as they did during the bicentennial celebrations, the French have shown they have a knack for the spec- tacular. Unlike Mr Mandelson and his angst-ridden Dome deliberators, this is because the French simply get on with it. A scheme for perfuming the Seine and filling the water with 2,000 multicoloured plastic fish is already well advanced. To the east of Paris, Nicolas Normier is building a 650-ft wooden Tour de la Terre to symbolise man's love of the environment. And to mark the arrival of 2000 itself, the Place de la Concorde will be turned into a vast sun- dial, using the Egyptian obelisk in the mid- dle of the square as a pointer. Meanwhile, outside Paris the inventor of the TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) will open a TGA (Tres Grand Aquarium) in La Rochelle, and a 1,200-km line of trees is being plant- ed from Dunkirk to the Pyrenees along the meridian line in preparation for a tits grand pique-nique on 14 July.

The Gauls aren't the only ones promising to leave Greenwich in the shade. If the French celebrations strike you as frivolous, you could always take the Appian Way to Rome instead. Indeed, walking is probably the best way of getting to the Eternal City for 2000, given the Roman authorities' inability to deliver a promised new metro line and car tunnel beside the Tiber in time. Despite these setbacks, however, Rome is the most symbolic place to cele- brate the passage of millennia and the one most likely to have worldwide appeal. This is because, for all Mr Mandelson's attempts to put a secular spin on the millennium, it is fundamentally a Christian celebration. Greenwich Mean Time may measure the minutes and hours, but the centuries take their cue from the Gregorian calendar and the birth of Christ — a fact recognised by only 12 per cent of Britons, according to a recent Gallup poll for the Daily Telegraph. If you happen to be standing in the middle of St Peter's Square on 31 December 1999, however, the sense of religious occasion will be inescapable. Estimates of visitors converging on Rome in 2000 range from 13 million to 40 million, dwarfing the opti- mistic 12 million expected at Greenwich. To cope with the influx of pilgrims, Rome's mayor, Francesco Turelli, has promised a new tram line and a huge new car park beneath the Janiculum Hill. He has 3.5 tril- Rural hypertension certainly makes a pleasant change from urban hypertension.' lion lire in public funds to pay for it but just as at Greenwich — there is trouble attracting money from the private sector.

Alternatively, if Rome proves too crowd- ed, there is Bethlehem. The town, which is under Palestinian rule, already boasts the Church of the Nativity, built over the cave where Jesus is believed to have been born. From 2000 it will also boast new hotels and a series of cultural events, promoted, ironi- cally, by M&C Saatchi, the same company charged by Mr Mandelson with boosting interest in the Dome. Not to be outdone, the Israelis are planning their own apoca- lyptic celebration at the mount of Megiddo — Hebrew for Armageddon — the site of the final battle between good and evil men- tioned in the Book of Revelation. The idea is to use holograms and actors dressed in costumes from the time of King Solomon to create a 'virtual Megiddo'. As Ze'ev Margalit, the official in charge of the devel- opment, puts it, 'The beauty of this place is that it has a 6,000-year history that can take people back to the dawn of civilisation.' It is also a short distance from Nazareth, Jesus' home town.

Greenwich is facing even stiffer competi- tion from Los Altos, California, where an entrepreneur is planning to use obsolete intercontinental ballistic missiles to launch thousands of artificial meteors, creating a pyrotechnic shower in the night sky 20 kilo- metres wide. On a more commercial note, the US networks are hoping to parlay inter- est in New York City's traditional ball- dropping ceremony in Times Square into a worldwide TV audience of 300 million. The idea is to relay images of people celebrat- ing the millennium in 24 different time- zones to Times Square as the year 2000 dawns around the globe. A few blocks north, at New York's Jacob Javits Center, Celebration 2000 is planning a supposedly more 'exclusive' series of media-driven spectaculars, although the guest list has yet to be announced, while in southern Califor- nia Party 2000 is hoping to attract 2.5 mil- lion revellers to a three-day orgy of pop music, featuring bands such as Oasis and the Rolling Stones — assuming of course that the geriatric rockers make it to the year 2000. Meanwhile, in the southern hemisphere, Ric Birch, producer of the opening ceremony for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, has been commissioned to stage a giant outdoor New Year's Eve celebration on the city's harbour front, while Gisborne, the most easterly city in New Zealand, is planning a festival for 60,000 party-goers.

The night of 31 December 1999 will also see bonfires in Iceland, giant beach parties in Rio and Colombo, and a fleet of Con- cordes and ocean liners converging on the international date line around the southern Pacific islands of Tonga and Fiji as the wealthy compete to be the first to see the dawn of the new millennium. Any one of these is likely to prove a far 'greater' day out than the New Millennium Experience's south London shindig, no matter what Mr Mandelson ends up putting inside his drea- ry pleasure dome.

The only consolation is that Greenwich can hardly be worse than Expo 2000 in Hanover, where the Germans have opted for the lugubrious Aryan theme of 'Man, Nature, Technology'. The German Chan- cellor, Helmut Kohl, has already invested DM 100 million in a 300,000-square ft pavilion, complete with a virtual-reality cityscape the size of 13 football pitches. At the same time, Hanover is getting an express train station, an additional airport terminal and a new subway line. But even in Germany the spotlight is likely to be elsewhere. On 31 December 1999 Herr Kohl might take up permanent residence in a new chancellery purpose-built for the occasion in Berlin, the capital of the new Germany, thereby fulfilling a 1,000-year- old dream. Given the barbarous history of the latter part of the second millennium, that is a prospect that ought to dampen everyone's millennial spirits.