Exhibition review: How they turned King Tut to tat

Guardian Unlimited (Rachel Cooke)

I go inside, hoping to escape the chaos; it's no better. A guard tells me that, this morning alone, they are expecting 500 schoolchildren. Is he exaggerating? No. A moment later the doors swing open and the first batch advances on us like a miniature army. These kids don't make my journey around the exhibition easy - especially since (pray that this trend never crosses the Atlantic) many of them have iPods with big microphones attached, into which they read aloud the notes that accompany the exhibits. It's maddening. So, too, is the sound from the headsets worn by those taking the audio tour, which is narrated by Omar Sharif - and the fact that each room has piped music: pan pipes when you're learning about Tutankhamun's wacky relatives; choral stuff once you're 'inside' his tomb.

Used to the reverential quiet of the British Museum, it takes me a while to get used to this - ditto the carpets and fake pillars which, though they're obviously designed to crank up the atmosphere (the carpets are meant to look like sand), have the opposite effect, making it harder than ever to believe that the objects I'm looking at are 3,000 years old.

See the above page for the full review.