The Titanic, Sinclair C5 and Brexit: the Museum of Failure is coming to the UK
Britain has been mismanaging inventions and ideas with impeccable style for centuries.Next spring, we will finally get a museum to celebrate the results: the Museum of Failure is coming to the UK.Its founder, Dr Samuel West, is anticipating a warm welcome: Britain, he said, was the museum’s spiritual home.“I’ve travelled all over the world with the museum but I’ve always wanted to bring it back home because of our black humour and our support of the underdog,” he said.“The Brits totally get it.
”The Museum of Failure, a travelling exhibition, is dedicated entirely to missteps, flops and aborted ambitions.Its collection spans failed gadgets, ill-fated design experiments, culinary disasters, corporate overreach – showcasing the messy, often hilarious side of innovation.UK-born exhibits include the Titanic, the Sinclair C5, the NHS’s national IT programme, Dyson’s Zone, Amstrad and The Body Shop.And, of course, Brexit.Ben Strutt, an innovator who conducts workshops on how to turn failure into strategic wins, has visited the museum and said it could change the conversation about failure by normalising it.
“Visitors will see how some of the biggest, most recognisable brands in the world have failed and how 42% of all startups fail,” he said,“They will also see how things failed in their time but were ultimately successful – like the Apple Newton paving the way for the iPhone, and Google Glass doing the same for augmented reality wearables – or how better products fail while worse ones succeed, like Betamax and VHS,” he said,But it is not just for scoffing at,West stressed that the museum was not about ridicule but about understanding ambition, risk and the lessons embedded in collapse,He said that despite all the talk about constructive failure in Silicon Valley and “failing forward”, for most people failure remained taboo.
“I want to reframe failure and show it is a universal and necessary part of innovation and learning,” he said.“The museum’s message is that we need to take bold meaningful risks to solve the largest problems of our times, environmental, social, economical.If we continue to glorify success and stigmatise failure we will not be able to experiment with and explore the solutions that we need.”Fiona Murden, a psychologist who has written about failure, said the museum could help people, especially young people, think differently about risk, creativity and resilience.But while glorifying success was a risk, she said, so was celebrating failure: “When failure is framed too positively, like it’s always a cool or enlightening experience, it can unintentionally send the message that failure is easy or without serious consequences.
That risks invalidating the frustration, stress and setbacks people genuinely experience, which can be significant, especially in high-stakes or personal contexts,”West agreed that the degree to which failures are or are not tolerated is largely cultural,“A woman came up to me after a talk I gave in Ivory Coast and she was really angry and she was right to be,” he said,“She pointed out that I was approaching failure as a rich, white, privileged western male – that if she failed in her business, her entire family would be plunged into poverty,“It’s the same if you’re a guest worker in Dubai or Qatar on a contract: if you fail, it’s not just a matter of you doing a postmortem workshop to discover what went wrong.
No, it’s your livelihood, it’s your family, it’s your visa,” he said,Failure is also understood differently across cultures,In China, visitors came to the museum so they could, they told West, laugh at failed western products,In South Korea, a risk-averse country, visitors were simply confused by what they perceived to be a celebration of failure,In the US, however, the museum was treated as a big joke.
“In the US, failure is framed in the narrative of success, and so visitors there found the museum funny,” said West.“They just didn’t get it when I tried to tell them that sometimes failures lead nowhere; they’re painful and there’s no happy ending.”But in Britain, where the venue has yet to be confirmed, he suspects the reception will be more intuitive.“The British sense of humour embraces that sarcastic, dark awareness that things can just go horribly wrong,” he said.
British Museum’s plan for ‘red, white and blue’ ball sparks row
An internal row has broken out within the British Museum over its director’s suggestion of a “red, white and blue” themed ball for 2026, after staff condemned it as “in poor taste” following the rise in flag-hoisting across the UK.Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the 272-year-old museum, has proposed a colour theme based on the union jack and French tricolore to mark next year’s loan of the Bayeux tapestry from Normandy.The suggestion has led to concerns being raised by staff within the museum’s curatorial and administrative departments, the Guardian understands.Some of the staff are said to argue that the idea is “in poor taste due to the current far-right flag campaigns around the country,” a source said.Since the summer, union jacks and other flags of the four nations of the UK have been hoisted from windows, bridges and lamp-posts in what has been described by some as a celebration of Britishness
The Titanic, Sinclair C5 and Brexit: the Museum of Failure is coming to the UK
Britain has been mismanaging inventions and ideas with impeccable style for centuries. Next spring, we will finally get a museum to celebrate the results: the Museum of Failure is coming to the UK.Its founder, Dr Samuel West, is anticipating a warm welcome: Britain, he said, was the museum’s spiritual home. “I’ve travelled all over the world with the museum but I’ve always wanted to bring it back home because of our black humour and our support of the underdog,” he said. “The Brits totally get it
The 10 best Australian films of 2025
What do films about occult practices, delicious porridge, Mongolian herders and a very cranky shark have in common? They’re all among the best Australian features released in 2025. To be eligible for this list, films must have had an Australian release outside the festival circuit in 2025, either theatrically or via streaming. All of the listed streaming or cinema information is correct at time of publication.10.Where to watch: stream on Prime Video or rent/buy on Apple TV, Prime Video and YouTubeMany years of watching horror movies has given me a steely stomach – but some of the images in Bring Her Back really got to me; they’re truly grotesque and I’m not sure I can ever forgive directors Danny and Michael Philippou (whose previous film was the fiendishly great Talk To Me)
The Apartment: Billy Wilder’s Christmas classic is the blueprint for romcoms everywhere
For romantic comedies and Christmas movies alike, a little misery can go a long way. No one understood this balancing act more than Billy Wilder, whose films ran the gamut from bottomless cynicism (Ace in the Hole) to gender-bending farce (Some Like it Hot). His 1960 film, The Apartment, splits the difference.Like another yuletide classic, Carol, the film finds inspiration in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which depicts an extramarital affair briefly consummated in the bed of a friend’s apartment. In an old interview, Wilder says he was compelled by a character “who comes back home and climbs into the warm bed the lovers just left”, and so The Apartment’s hero, CC “Bud” Baxter, was born
Unseen Tennessee Williams radio play published in literary magazine
As one of the 20th century’s most successful playwrights, Tennessee Williams penned popular works at the very pinnacle of US theater, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.Years before his almost unparalleled Broadway triumphs, however, the aspiring writer then known simply as Tom wrote a series of short radio plays as he struggled to find a breakthrough. One is The Strangers, a supernatural tale offering glimpses into the accomplished wordsmith that Williams would become, and published for the first time this week in the literary magazine Strand.It is a “significant find” according to scholars of Williams’s early days and upbringing in Missouri.“The play incorporates all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,” said Andrew Gulli, the publication’s managing editor
My cultural awakening: Love Actually taught me to leave my cheating partner
Emma Thompson’s quiet suffering in the hit Christmas movie helped me to realise that I didn’t need to stay with someone who had betrayed meI was 12 when Love Actually came out. In the eyes of my younger self it was a great film – vignettes of love I could only imagine one day feeling, all coloured by the fairy lights of Christmas. And there was even a cameo from Mr Bean himself, Rowan Atkinson. The film captured the romance I craved as a preteen, the idea that maybe a kid I fancied in my class would learn the drums for me and run through airport security to ask me out.I was young enough to think it was sweet for Keira Knightley’s husband’s best friend to turn up on her doorstep declaring his quite obviously unrequited love
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