Creepy Creepy Museum Dummies
(N.B. for the really creepy bit skip ahead to the bottom...) My first museum sported a ploughman dummy which, after repainting by a volunteer, resembled a boiled Nigel Mansell. I remember well (usually around 3 a.m.) the feeling of removing his flat cap and discovering there was NOTHING underneath, the face ending in a sheer cut through moth-eaten expanding foam. (N.B. I refer to the dummy, not the volunteer. I'm not in the habit of touching volunteers' headgear). There are broadly two schools of thought regarding the value of museum dummies (that's in the exhibitions, not staff). They can be either valuable interpretive assets which breathe life into a display by giving a sense of past people's interaction with their world, or... they're effing creepy and OH MY WORD WHY WOULD YOU EVER PUT SOMETHING LIKE THAT IN YOUR MUSEUM KILL IT KILL IT! I have a real soft spot for museum dummies - admittedly to a great extent out of a love of the absurd rather than a desire to