Then, in 1987, Mike spotted an advert in the media pages of The Guardian, for a mould-maker at Madame Tussauds. ‘I sent a photograph of my work and got an interview. They asked me in for a three day test; I had no tools, no knowledge — it was really embarrassing, but when I got there and looked through the glass windows, there were all the sculptors in one room, all the makers in another and there was Michael Caine sat at the other side of the window being measured up. That was it; I knew I wanted to work there.’ ‘It was like being in an Ealing Comedy working there,’ he continues, ‘really old school, full of men approaching retirement age. They all came from a plastering firm in Hammersmith that was like the ‘Rolls Royce’ of plastering. If No.10 Downing Street needed its cornicing done, they were the guys for the job. But, most of the time, they’d be working on their own projects like building doll's houses for their granddaughters. What they liked about me was that I was fresh blood, and in effect I gained an apprenticeship.’ ‘It wasn’t down to being particularly skilled,’ says Mike, although to me, the ability to accurately conjure someone’s head strikes me as extraordinarily skilled. But Mike assures me that ‘it’s just the ability to be able to see
in 3D; it really is a learnable skill, but it is a real discipline. We do exactly today what they would have done in the 1800s. Although now in some places they use scanners, I still prefer the old-fashioned way.’ Usually he will work from photographs, but it sounds like a form of human geometry when it is sometimes necessary to take up to 200 or so measurements of a subject’s head and body. Tussauds’ appeal to Mike derived from his love of classic horror films. ‘It began with Hitchcock’s The Birds which I saw when I was 12. My parents would go to bed on a Friday night and leave me watching the weekly horrors. It was the old-school masterpieces starring Christopher Lee and films like Dr. Caligari. My ambition is to one day make a museum of classic horror films’ ‘For somebody who loved horror films, working at Tussauds was a treat.’ Clearly he enjoys the romance of the macabre as much as the work. ‘People who were going to be models would donate their clothes; there was a wardrobe at Tussauds full of them. You could look through the rack of clothes and find infamous murderer’s clothes such as the murderer John Christie who bequeathed his clothes from the dock before descending below to be hanged.’ > bridporttimes.co.uk | 71