Eiffel Tower: Building The Impossible review: How furious Parisians nearly gave the Eiffel Tower a saucy makeover, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Eiffel Tower: Building the Impossible (BBC4)
Have you seen the French National Orchestra, soaking wet in clear plastic ponchos, and that grand piano filling with water like a rain barrel?
Yes, the Olympics opening ceremony was a bust. What fun! Every true Brit enjoys the spectacle as France tries to look très magnifique and ends up with oeuf on le visage.
But it could have been so much worse. It could have all happened in the shadow of a 1,000ft Wicked Willie.
Geraldine James, who narrated Eiffel Tower: Building The Impossible, revealed that Parisians hated their iron monument so much that a competition was held to cover it up for the city’s 1900 World’s Fair a decade after it was built. The oversized pylon itself was condemned as “useless and monstrous”.
This entertainingly quirky documentary combines archive footage with CGI stills to tell the story of Gustave Eiffel (center)
The Eiffel Tower seen from the nearby stadium where beach volleyball will be held during the 2024 Paris Olympics
One plan to hide it involved a giant bell tower with a clock on top. Another plan was to place the tower in a tubular shaft, with a large copper ball on top. That looked… well, vulgar is too polite a word. It was downright obscene.
This entertainingly quirky documentary combines archive footage with CGI stills to tell the story of Gustave Eiffel, a visionary engineer who made Isambard Kingdom Brunel look like a guy who spent his weekend tinkering in his shed.
Not only did Eiffel intimidate Paris into allowing him to build what was then the world’s tallest structure, he was also the driving force behind the creation of the Statue of Liberty and designed a system of locks for the Panama Canal.
Much of the technical explanation was in French, with subtitles, meaning you had to concentrate if you wanted to understand Eiffel’s innovations.
Not only did Eiffel intimidate Paris into allowing him to build the world’s tallest structure, he also designed the Statue of Liberty and a system of locks for the Panama Canal.
The Eiffel Tower lights up and displays the Olympic rings during the opening ceremony on Friday
The key, apparently, was the strength of his intersecting girders, which supported the outer trusses. These made his structures relatively light, although the tower still weighs more than 7,000 tons. Every part had to fit together perfectly, with measurements accurate to a tenth of a millimeter.
A professor took us to Vietnam, once a French colony, to show how two of Eiffel’s first bridges survived the war and still span the river in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. The professor seemed to have little faith in his own ability to survive there — he was on the back of a moped, weaving through heavy traffic, both hands gripping the saddle like a nun on a racehorse.
The story was full of strange details. Eiffel himself was discredited three years after the tower was completed — convicted of complicity in fraud and sentenced to two years in prison.
His tower was supposed to be demolished after 20 years, but he was granted a stay of execution because it proved useful as a radio antenna.
Computer graphics showed him as a guy with a grand beard and a top hat. These images were apparently created with AI software. It saved the cost of hiring actors, I guess, but it made the old Gustave look like a digital wax figure.