Madame Tussauds – Bangkok: Part 3

By Kay McMahon, 19 August 2011

Next up was the Television room. So I featured on the Oprah Winfrey show. I didn’t find her very responsive to my probing questions about her new career with her own TV network. And then…

We were invited to the A-List party! Dave loves coffee so he was happy to have a coffee with George Clooney, although he complained that the coffee wasn’t real and the cup was glued to the table.

We met Nicole Kidman (who also towered above me) – she looked beautiful. And Nicolas Cage was looking very moody but he let me take a few portrait shots of him.

Brad and Angelina were there but I declined to have my photo taken beside them. By this time I’d had enough of looking very small and somewhat ugly compared to all these gods and goddesses of what’s considered to be physically attractive these days.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we also met Johnny Depp somewhere along the route. He was dressed in his pirate costume and looked most handsome. What a charming fellow he was. I had to stand inside a barrel looking smug or grumpy (under the direction of a staff photographer) while Dave made an idiot of himself on the other side of Depp. This was all for a pro photo. (More later.)

And (almost) finally, we get to the behind-the-scenes exhibit, where the process is all explained. Did you know that more than 20 artists are involved in making each figure? The cost for a figure is around £150,000 and it takes about five weeks to do the hair of one. Amazing! And then they let the general public like us mess about with them.

Then there was the photo thing. We traded in our vouchers for two free photos taken of us by their staff. And then we realised why the staff had been so keen to take so many photos of us posing with the stars. You can buy these for about £4 for a small one. No thanks. To be fair to the staff, they were also willing to take photos of us with our own cameras. But I am a bit possessive about my kit and don’t like trusting it into anyone else’s hands. I’m the same with my chef’s knives.

And then before exiting you go through the gift shop. What a load of tat. Yawn.

To sum up the outing, I loved it. It was a really fun thing to do. I suppose the expense was justified by the great experience and possibly motivated by the exhibitor’s wish to keep the crowds down. I would recommend it to you if you have the budget not to mind spending such a lot for an hour or so of fun.