Dome Decade: Opening night dooms the dome

Unsurprisingly, it was an inauspicious launch on that cold night of December 31, 1999.

For that inauspicious launch was the fulfillment of weeks and months of corroding scepticism which maintained the view that the Millennium Dome was not only a white elephant, and not only a white elephant summoned by a vacuous government, but both those things at a price tag approaching £800million.

But the bitterness of the wind and the chilliness of the welcome did not prevail entirely that night.

For those inside the (literal and metaphorical) tent, the Dome was a blast. A giggle. An uproarious upsurge of through-the-looking-glass chaos. A once-in-lifetime revel in cloud cuckoo land.

I was working for the newly-launched Metro in 1999 determined to do something special for the millennium. When the Dome organisers and Metro agreed to produce a daily newspaper at the attraction I schemed, and wheedled, and pleaded and threatened unsavoury bouts of self-harm until I secured the role of editor.

I had just one month to turn a concrete box into a fully-functioning, wired up and staffed newspaper office. But, in the makeshift, by-the-skin-of-its-teeth world of the Dome, such a timescale was a luxury and my problems were a tic on the hide of a haughty hippopotamus.

Because, by then, the millennium had become a byword for failure, for tasteless, overblown projects characterised by lack of merit, lack of management and lack of execution.

Remember, for example, the £100,000 Millennium Project to recreate the journey of a three-tonne blue stone from Wales to Stonehenge via a wooden frame on land and then upon currachs over the Bristol Channel. On some days too few volunteers showed up to drag the stone. When they did, they toiled to the steady drone of archeologists who contended that this depiction of the stone's journey was a fiction less than a century old. Finally, the stone, I recall, now tired of its divisive and uncelebrated life, broke free from its currach bonds and slipped to the bottom of the Bristol Channel, never to be seen, or publicly funded, again.

Millennial metaphors like that were flinging themselves in front of coachloads of public opprobrium every day. Empty art galleries. Bizarre installations. Muddle-headed awards. And at the epicentre of this millennium meltdown was pomposity writ large - architect Richard Rogers' breathtaking Millennium Dome.

It was stuffed with exhibits that no-one really understood, paid for by vested interests which guaranteed incoherence and promoted by such arch luminaries as John Prescott and Peter Mandelson who wore hard hats and told us 'it' would be brilliant without ever fully defining 'it'.

But even then, as opening night approached, all was not lost. Yes, there was a debate about the state's ability to run an exhibition (none) and the mishandled Faith zone and the diluted sense of Britishness.

But everyone was ready to set aside ideological differences. For this night was party night. It was Millennium Eve and all was not lost.

And then, all of a sudden, it was.

The uncanny ability of the New Millennium Experience Company to meet every nuance and subclause of Sod's Law ensured that the one thing - the one thing - that should never have happened, happened.

NMEC put all the nation's opinion formers and decision makers and VIPs and potential ambassadors in one place - Stratford - then couldn't figure out how to get them to the Dome in an orderly and timely fashion. NMEC couldn't figure out how not to ruin their evening.

On the biggest party night of their lives, after having discarded invitations from sunnier climes and more august hosts, editors and A-listers and influencers, philosophers, politicians and soapboxers found themselves abandoned and disregarded. They stomped their feet, muttered darkly and formulated a campaign of such vitriol that no goodie bags, no Corrs, no apologies, Big Ben chimes, fireworks, freebies and Dome-shaped paperweights could act as a balm.

And then, to cap it all, that fuming throng found a face for their sombre picture of chilly disappointment.

Prime Minister Tony Blair seized the hand of a reluctant and decidedly glum elderly lady and failed spectacularly to rouse her to a rendition of Auld Lang Syne. That old lady was the Queen, unused to manhandling, and her sourpuss visage captured the overwhelming sense of hollowness that the Millennium Eve was for many.

Down among the plebs, though, all was well. We sang and drank and cosied up to strangers and caroused with Chelsea pensioners and acted inappropriately with people we planned never to meet again for another 1,000 years.

And so the theme was set. While the managers of the Dome set about their task with Eric-Sykes-and-a-plank as their business model - forever flattening each other at every twist and turn - the folk who busied themselves around the attraction - the cheerful Yellow Coats, the soup sellers and sushi dealers, the high-flying trapezoids, the robot wranglers, the flower potters, the bedazzled visitors and, yes, the journo Charlies in their chocolate factory, found themselves in a mad, tumble of surreality and glee.

It was my first experience of working within the public sector and never had I seen such unashamed profligacy and waste.

The Daily Dome staff each received T-shirts with the newspaper logo carefully embroidered on the breast. We never wanted them. We never wore them. Nor the sweat shirts, the fleeces, the coats. (Still got them. They were made to last, people.)

We each were allowed to pick our computer equipment out of catalogues. So we went straight to the high-end, don't-be-silly-now section, wiped the drool from our unhinged chins and ordered up the best that (your) money could buy.

We had a state-of-the-art plasma screen on the office wall - as shiny as the epoch and as wide as Africa. Never worked.

When the roof leaked, we called in a company from the North of England who came at great expense - night in a Travelodge, full English at Woolley Edge services - only to tell us that the leak was coming from the outside. They only repaired leaks originating from the inside.

So we sent them on their way and ordered down a second company from the North of England capable of handling the job.

When I casually remarked the sun was in my eyes, hundreds of pounds were spent on frosted glass film to nurse my fragile orbs. In the private sector, you put box files on the sill or you buy a baseball hat or you go gently blind. Not here. What joy!

We were supposed to be an interactive office. People were meant to come in, poke the hacks like we were recalcitrant automatons, before going on to create their own newspapers and watching their emails flow into the letters page.

But the computers bought for the public never worked. So people came in, tapped a few keys with candy floss fingers, saw nothing happen and traipsed out again. What unmolested joy!

Meanwhile, the Dome spinners were turning themselves inside out to win back the opinion they had so astutely poisoned but they became besieged and overwhelmed and clueless and bullying and bitter.

It could have been different. The Government could have stayed away but it didn't, the finances could have been controlled but they weren't, the politicians and bureaucrats could have understood they were wonks not Wonkas but they hypnotised by the stage lights.

Much lost ground was recouped. Much fun was had. Many memories forged, many spirits were salved, many recycled Dome pencils purchased. Like Churchill, the Dome began to be lovable to many of us precisely because of its flaws - but it simply ran out of time.

If they had captured the spirit of optimism and goodwill and good cheer among the carefree footstompers in the stalls that first night and allowed that essence to fuel the engine of the Dome, everyone would have been happy.

But they didn't. So just a few of us were happy. And, happily, I was one of them.