“There’s nothing like a visit to Madame Tussauds in London to make you feel your age,” says Craig Brown in the Daily Mail. Gone are the waxworks of yesteryear: Morecambe and Wise, Bobby Moore, Vera Lynn. The likes of Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra have been replaced with Little Mix, Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande. Politicians are totally out of fashion – the only prime minister I spotted on a recent visit was Winston Churchill. Behind him was Emmeline Pankhurst, “wagging a finger”.
The one area where the waxy inhabitants haven’t changed is the Chamber of Horrors: John Haigh, the “Acid Bath Murderer”; Dr Crippen; the Kray Brothers; and “poor, poor” Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. In recent years they have been joined by the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, “staring through the bars of a cell”. It’s a “bizarre” spectacle, mass murderers standing “just a few yards away from Hollywood stars and the royal family”. But in the “strange world of Madame Tussauds, murder offers the psychopath a charmed route to posterity”.