Science Museum's 'dumbing up' programme is more than welcome

Cheering news from the Science Museum, which has begun a programme of “dumbing up”. After years of obsessing over accessibility for children to the point where most exhibits comprised a sticky screen and a few buttons, it has remembered that grown-ups are interested in museums too.

A happy consequence of this is the new Clockmakers’ Museum on the first floor, recently opened by Princess Anne. It is the oldest collection of clocks and watches in the world, and had previously been housed in London’s Guildhall; but after 200 years there, negotiations on the lease broke down.

When the Science Museum’s director, Ian Blatchford, heard of this, he immediately offered a space within his own museum for 30 years.

He said it was the perfect fit “because time is a core scientific concept”. It’s a fascinating collection, which will now be accessible to the 3 million people who trudge round the Science Museum every year, as against the thousands who visit Guildhall. And best of all, there’s not a touchscreen in sight.

Blair’s belief

Tony Blair believes he would have won the 2010 election had he still been Labour leader, according to leaked private emails. News of his continued self-belief isn’t really a marmalade-dropper any more, but I’m still fascinated by insights into his character. The 1990s fitness guru Mr Motivator is the latest to add his view. He recalls bumping into Blair at a party at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1998, who said: “Hello, Motivator ... Listen, this place upsets me. Robin Cook has a bigger office than mine at Number 10. Mine is about half the size and I’m the Prime Minister!” Mr Motivator claims he was joking, but he wasn’t really.

Overlooked art

Gongs a go-go for grandees of the arts and literary worlds, with New Year Honours being awarded to Sir Roy Strong, Ed Victor, Matthew Bourne and William Sieghart, among others. One person who should have been recognised is Andrew Davies. Few people outside the media know who he is, but millions enjoy his work. He’s the screenwriter behind dozens of the best literary adaptations on TV: Vanity Fair, Bleak House, Pride and Prejudice – you name it. And not just bonnet dramas: he wrote the script for The Line of Beauty and adapted Michael Dobbs’s political thriller, House of Cards. Now he’s got two major new dramas airing on rival channels – a six-part War and Peace starting on BBC 1 on Sunday night, and the fourth and last series of Mr Selfridge on ITV, which begins on Friday. Not bad for a man who turns 80 this year. Perhaps his mistake is to live in Warwickshire, not Warwick Avenue.

Watch and learn

Literary purists face a familiar dilemma on Sunday night – whether to watch the new War and Peace despite not having read the book (Tolstoy’s 1,000-page saga was recently ranked second behind Nineteen Eighty-Four as the book that most people have lied about having read). Andrew Davies admits he had never read it before being asked to adapt it, and his solution was to rip his copy in half, to make it less threatening. I’m going to use the new TV version as a challenge to speed-read it in six chunks. With only 166.66 pages to read every week, surely I can stay one step ahead of every episode?

The losing ticket

Spare a thought for Edwina and David Nylan, the Lancashire couple who thought they’d won £35m on the lottery, only to discover the Camelot app hadn’t processed their purchase. All six of their numbers matched, but the sale hadn’t gone through because they had only 60p in their account, not enough to cover the £2 ticket. If Camelot had a heart, they would bung the Nylans a token reward. Then again, this is the lottery company that changed the odds of winning the jackpot from one in 14 million to one in 45 million. They sugared the pill by making the chances of winning £1m go up, but in fact the overall chances of winning a cash prize have gone down significantly. It’s not exactly in the festive spirit, especially for those down to their last 60p.

Hard times

For a tale of being hard done by, few can match that of John Harrison, the Yorkshire carpenter who cracked the problem of determining longitude in the 18th century. His story was brilliantly told by Dava Sobel in her book Longitude, which was reissued to mark its 20th anniversary. It was memorably adapted for TV by Charles Sturridge, who directed most of Granada’s Brideshead Revisited, and led Harrison to be voted 39th in the BBC’s “100 Greatest Britons” poll of 2002. The worst part of his story was how the British government, having offered a prize of £20,000 to whoever could crack the problem (an unimaginably large amount of money back then), refused to pay out. Harrison had dedicated his entire life to it, and finally – exhausted, aged 79 – appealed to George III to intervene. He did so, and ordered the government to cough up, saying: “By God, this man has been wronged.” I suppose not being rewarded for 60 years’ work puts failing to buy a lottery ticket into context.