Following on from the last Blog… Not one complaint about the train ride out to Docklands this year. Has the old bogey about ExCeL at last been laid to rest? Even though by 6:15pm each evening during ICE the Custom House station on the DLR line was mobbed and the crowds held back on the bridge for their own platform safety.
And no-one said one word in my hearing which could be construed as negative about ICE, unless it was to bewail its vastness and the necessity to walk from one end to another to see exhibitors. For those folk (sometimes admittedly including myself) there is the new revelation of a little shop hiring out golf carts… And those folk will have to show forbearance because Clarion is reckoning it will take all 22 halls at ExCeL within four years!
It was glitzy; it was glamorous; it had everything from ultimate fighting in a full-sized ring (shudder) to six-foot guys sporting beards but wearing mini-skirts and high-heeled red shoes (bigger shudder), to those six-foot blonde girls in Austrian costume offering Mozart chocs to passers by (warm glow). It had showgirls in little more than feathers (warmer glow) and it even had slot machines with a little imagination and considerable innovation.
Add together the population at ICE on all three days and you’re going to be up there at around 60,000 I expect once the show-wars-motivated final stats are revealed – not forgetting to emphasise that ICE’s attendance stats are independently audited, thus cocking a transatlantic snook (no pun intended).
Therefore talking about warm glows, that effectively sums up my feeling, at least, for ICE 2016.
And for those, including myself, who railed against the necessity to wear a high-visibility yellow jacket to enter the hall on build-up, it was not of Clarion’s doing. This is apparently a new “health and safety” regulation, which I would interpret as a new wheeze for screwing the exhibitors to the tune of £4 a jacket.
Someone’s on to a good little number.
