User:Neddyseagoon/sandbox/BM in popular culture
This is a list of the appearances of the British Museum in literature, television, film and other popular culture.
Film
[edit]- Hitchcock's Blackmail, though the building is played by a set.
- The Mummy Returns, though UCL plays the building.
Music
[edit]- The George Gershwin song "A Foggy Day (in London Town)" states that "The British Museum had lost its charm".
Radio
[edit]- Various episodes of The Goon Show reference the BM, most particularly in "The Plasticine Man" where the Plasticine Man is taken there, "The Mummified Priest" in which Crun, Eccles and Seagoon work there as Egyptologists, and "Drums Along the Mersey" in which Min and Henry ask Seagoon if they might display his million pounds there.
TV
[edit]- The quiz show Codex.
- The documentary The Museum.
- The 2003 adaptation of Five Little Pigs in the Agatha Christie's Poirot series featured filming in room 23 and in the Reading Room.
Literature
[edit]- The British Museum Is Falling Down features a scholar working in the Reading Room as its main character.
Comics
[edit]- A "secret annexe" of the British Museum (fictional, though possibly inspired by the real-life Secretum) is the base of operations for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the eponymous series of comics. Exhibits there include a yahoo skull (from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels) and statues labelled "Cult of Ayesha" (from H. Rider Haggard's She), continuing the high game of literary allusions throughout the series.