So Bright Club.

Wow. Really. Wow.

I’ve been to a few of the monthly Bright Club, and it has always been brilliant.

Bright Club, run by UCL’s Public Engagement Unit, breaks down the barriers about stuffy incomprehensible beardy weirdy academics and says, no. Academics are clever, witty and really like sweeties.

Tuesday saw the biggest Bright Club yet, as Steve Cross pointed out the audience was large enough to constitute an angry mob. The theme was hidden treasures (lots of museum and archaeology goodness involved) and it was great.  So in between the fits of giggles and accidently kicking the poor person in front of me in the head when I laughed too hard I learnt some stuff too.  And that’s what is great about bright club ‘its educational’.

I learnt that archaeology and in fact the whole human condition comes down to sex, death and violence.  Indiana Jones was a trader in illicit antiquities and UCL has a cultural property policy that involves a lot of lists.  Some philosopher dude, I think it was Schopenhauer, hated everyone and everything, but really liked poodles. Turns out lots of genius people like poodles (there’s a website dedicated to it) Some librarians are stupid and organise their collections by colour. Victorian lead line coffins often lead to exploding corpses.  Museum audience development officers as a rule have bigger breasts than Lara Croft.  The British Museum should actually be renamed the National Museum of Cool Stuff we Won in the Wars,oh and the only difference between a museum curator and a serial killer is a lab coat. And Picasso wanted to take women to the ‘4^th dimension’ and his friends girlfriend was a very naughty girl called Alice.

Also Kudos to Anne, who managed to stun the audience into silence, that’s no mean feat.