It's a constant amazement to me how little the world looks like Dan Dare, the hero of the Eagle comic: by the improbable year 2008, I would confidently have expected to float into the Science Museum on one of the Mekon's little flying saucer cushions, entering by an airlock on the 117th floor.
Even the Mekon might be surprised that the hugely entertaining exhibition, about the birth of high-tech Britain in the 1950s, is free. At the Science Museum it takes a valiant soul to struggle through the barricades of ticket desks for the bewildering assortment of charging exhibitions and attractions.
Mine was essentially a Victorian childhood, albeit in 1950s Dublin. We had no television until a year after my father took up a column as a television critic, and comics were banned - like ice pops and chewing gum - until my parents discovered the Reverend Marcus Morris, God bless him.
His wholesome comics, Robin, followed by Girl for me and the Eagle for my brothers, were the toe in the door that would soon swing wider for Bunty and the Dandy.
I attribute my career in journalism and my brother's in advertising entirely to the Eagle: certainly everything either of us knows to this day about the workings of a nuclear power plant or a sewage pumping station comes from cutaway drawings in the Eagle.
There's an even more surprising innovation buried so deep in the museum's website that having stumbled on it by accident, it took me 15 minutes to find it again: a "wiki" catalogue for the exhibition, to which anyone can add.
The calibre of the contributors is so startling (they include an Australian-based radar mechanic who worked on the Javelin bomber, an engineer who led part of the Bloodhound air defence system, and a publisher who worked with Morris) that I slightly suspect the museum of seeding the site.
But it's an alluring idea that others might copy: meanwhile I've registered the little known fact that I invented the Hillman Imp car, the Morphy Richards popup toaster, and the Roentgen IV X ray machine.
objectwiki.sciencemuseum.org.uk/wiki/Home
Even the Mekon might be surprised that the hugely entertaining exhibition, about the birth of high-tech Britain in the 1950s, is free. At the Science Museum it takes a valiant soul to struggle through the barricades of ticket desks for the bewildering assortment of charging exhibitions and attractions.
Mine was essentially a Victorian childhood, albeit in 1950s Dublin. We had no television until a year after my father took up a column as a television critic, and comics were banned - like ice pops and chewing gum - until my parents discovered the Reverend Marcus Morris, God bless him.
His wholesome comics, Robin, followed by Girl for me and the Eagle for my brothers, were the toe in the door that would soon swing wider for Bunty and the Dandy.
I attribute my career in journalism and my brother's in advertising entirely to the Eagle: certainly everything either of us knows to this day about the workings of a nuclear power plant or a sewage pumping station comes from cutaway drawings in the Eagle.
There's an even more surprising innovation buried so deep in the museum's website that having stumbled on it by accident, it took me 15 minutes to find it again: a "wiki" catalogue for the exhibition, to which anyone can add.
The calibre of the contributors is so startling (they include an Australian-based radar mechanic who worked on the Javelin bomber, an engineer who led part of the Bloodhound air defence system, and a publisher who worked with Morris) that I slightly suspect the museum of seeding the site.
But it's an alluring idea that others might copy: meanwhile I've registered the little known fact that I invented the Hillman Imp car, the Morphy Richards popup toaster, and the Roentgen IV X ray machine.
objectwiki.sciencemuseum.org.uk/wiki/Home
