Phil Masters visits the Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain exhibition at the Science Museum in London, and ponders the associated social history.
The problem for an exhibition like this, I fear, is that it has to deal with the persistent scent of failure that hangs over its subject-matter. The Hi-Tech Britain of which this exhibition speaks meant a motor industry whose management and workforce alike were all too stuck in old ways; it meant Comet airliners which crashed, and lost us that crucial lead to Boeing; it meant shiny new diesel and then electric trains, running on essentially Victorian tracks. There was some brilliance there, but too much of it was necessary ingenuity, improvisation around ingrained habits, bad decisions, and the problems of a country still recovering from its involvement in an expensive war.
Harold Wilson’s “White Heat of Technology” from the sixties now seems terribly, terribly dated, especially when people use imagery from that era decades later. I remember a logo in the 1980s featuring a stylised image of an electric train passing the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. It was meant to promote industry and modernity, but left me with an impression of an organisation stuck two decades in the past. The worst irony was the locomotive, one of the unsuccessful first-generation machines from the 1955 modernisation plan, which turned out to be hopelessly unreliable and destined for the scrapheap after a relatively short life.
Phil concludes that Dan Dare himself wasn’t so much a man of the future as a man of the recent past:
But not only is Dan Dare not flying the spacelanes in our defence, he’s never going to, whatever may happen in space research. We’re unlikely ever to see his sort again, and perhaps a big symptom of Britain’s problems in the 1950s was the idea that the hi-tech future would lie with a square-jawed pilot who wouldn’t have been out of place in the Battle of Britain, backed up by a comedy Yorkshire sidekick and a gruffly paternalistic staff officer.
Read the whole thing.