Let's face it.  I've come here so you don't have to.

The Madame Tussauds Wax Museum (featuring Scream and the Spirit of London ride) takes up a block on Marylebone Street. I'm here because I'm too chicken for the London Dungeon, which has live rats and actors who will condemn you to death (and then a boat cruise).  I thought the famous Tussauds Chamber of Horrors would serve nicely:  illuminate for me the horrors of London's history without reliving them. 

But first we (me and a gum-chewing group of teenagers, plus one 60-year-old who kept saying to his wife, "Come on, old thing,") entered the hall of Hollywood: Brad and Angelina, Will Smith, Nicole Kidman, and dozens of others.  Actually, because the quality of verisimilitude varies from figure to figure, I had trouble figuring out who they were.  For example, the profile of Will Smith is quite good, look at the full-face and something gets lost; he resembles Dumbo.

You can do more than look at them, of course, pose with them or put a discreet hand on their breasts, which one lad was doing with, I think, Heather Graham. Or maybe it was Sienna Miller. There were candy wagons every 20 feet for sustenance or so and 'professional' photographers to take a picture you paid for, a picture of you and George Clooney sipping coffee (hmm. Doesn't he do ads for Nescafe?). 

The historical and royal rooms were better.  Nelson Mandela is down the row from Gandhi, who I really thought was good although he is kind of waxy-looking to begin with. It is apparent that the male celebrities are slipping the model-makers an extra fiver to thicken their hair.  Prince William is a little thinner on top than he is here and Prince Charles was positively luxuriant.  Speaking of Royals, the museum must have a bigger challenge placing figures on the floor than a wedding planner does seating tables.  Diana cannot be with Prince Charles.  He is with Camilla, and she is dead.  But even dead, she's more popular than any of them.  Tussauds has solved this problem by placing Diana with the dead royals--your Henry VIII, your Victoria--but looking sidelong towards the Royal Family. They look slightly nervous.

Churchill looks puckish, Tony Blair also slipped a fiver to the hair people, but Barack Obama is just wrong.  The Oval Office takes up a sizable space on the display.  You can sit at the desk, there are lots of Yes We Can posters) but the Great Orator looks like a frat boy who will pull the chair out from under you. Or maybe there's something I don't know about life at the White House.

I walked down several stairs to the Chamber of Horrors and bravely declined several posters offering a chance to escape.  There were a few torture instruments and their occupants, but sadly, the Chamber has been relegated to a waiting area for Scream, at which a young man paid to do so shouted and stuffed the aforesaid gum-chewing (now screaming) teens into the show. If I want to walk the paths of Jack the Ripper, I will have to go to Whitechapel and do it like a grownup.  But there were great videogames near the waiting area, where I managed to kill several aliens with an AK-47.

The last part of Tussauds was the Spirit of London ride.  Ever been to Disney's Peter Pan ride? The vehicles for Spirit of London moved along a track just like that, only they were London taxicabs. It was meant to be light-hearted. We passed Queen Victoria working the levers of Big Ben, pigeons flapped around us,  various television personalities were popping up out of doors--no,wait, that was the Britain's got Talent TV waxworks next door.  It all got rather fuzzy at this point.  I do remember part of the ride being devoted to the Poor outside the Workhouse.  It was like Disney adding a Hooverville to one of its patriotic theme rides.  Which it probably has.

Madame Tussaud's made her first wax figure of the mistress of King Louis. She was doing other wax figures of the royal court when early rioters during the French Revolution broke into her shop and demanded their wax heads to put on pikes.  Soon, employed by the revolutionaries, she was collecting the real thing.  Tussaud was in the Bastille the day after it was stormed, looking for heads of the dead.

In those days, France was up one day, down the next (just what happened to the Jennifer Aniston wax head that once stood next to Brad Pitt!). Tussaud barely escaped France with her life.  For years she travelled around England showing her wax images of the historic and soon, the famous.  Before newspaper photos, they were all ordinary people had to conjure up the famous.  Today, at the wax museum, there are no bodyguards and publicists to keep them from us.

Tussaud's is an extraordinary story of what kind of will some people have to survive. For that reason, I'm glad I went.  Plus the Daniel Craig statue was lifelike enough to give me quite a thrill.