Hot Wax

I’ve been terrified of many things in my life – rollercoasters, girls, scrambled egg – but nothing makes me quite as anxious as waxwork models. Those shiny exteriors, the glazed stares, their creepy immobility – it’s just like your average indie rock gig in London. The (dreadful) teen-shlock film ‘House of Wax’ (based on an old Vincent Price number) suggested that the architects of such work are shit-eatingly demented cellar dwellers, and there’s surely some truth to that. I’m just glad I can reap logic from a movie that features Paris Hilton being skewered with a pickaxe.

‘Louis Tussauds House of Wax’ is, I’d wager, one of the closet real-life examples to the museum portrayed in that film. I’d never been there (I’ve never had any reason to visit Great Yarmouth – just like every other human being that hasn’t emerged from some primordial soup), which is a good thing - as judging by the works on display I doubt the proprietor would let me leave. Every detail I can dig-up on this chap screams ‘3rd-rate B-movie staple villain’; the kind who’d wear a blood-soaked sack-cloth and have a face like a wizened bollock. The man in question claims to be called ‘Peter Hayes’ – though I imagine he adopts the moniker ‘Vigo Vikernes the Usurper’ or suchlike on museum tours – is 80 years old, has run the museum for half a century and is named after Madame Tussauds’ great grandson. We might as well get some bint who used to be in Dawsons Creek to turn-up in Norfolk and run around screaming in a gore-splattered bikini.

Peter’s work is so stupefyingly abominable that it almost causes the universe to implode in on itself, though you have to give him some leeway being that he’s probably a hunchback, has a golden nugget instead of an eyeball and is forced to go about his drudgery using the two protruding stumps he was gifted instead of hands. His creations include Chris Tarrant and Anthea Turner – revolting, malformed beings that stepped straight from The Satanic Bible, and those are just the originals. Legend has it he has forgotten who some of his creations were meant to resemble, and that visitors to the museum are welcome to speculate. Incorrect guesses result in the tourist behind sent to an airless chamber beneath the museum, which they must share for eternity with Simon Weston – whose charred face is the only logical inspiration for this whole shambles.

I apologise profusely for the Hate Mail links (I am certainly no advocate of Oswald Mosley), but HERE are some more details about the exhibits, plus a couple of examples of the dark lord’s handiwork;




The main reason I have dragged-up Hayes’ corrupt conceptions (these were first passed around viral emails years back) is that Madame Tussauds – supposedly the uberlords of uncanny wax tributes – have been half-inching his work. They have just unveiled a homage to Jonathan Ross which is frankly identifiable only by the studio façade that surrounds the waxwork. Once more the money-churning machine rips-off ‘the little guy’. Although if Hollywood were to document this fable, Hayes would be anything but little…