Pierre-Yves Gerbeau is so used to dealing with a complete turkey that the thought of being interviewed by RTE's Dustin held no terrors. The chief executive of London's Dome was in Dublin yesterday doing the media rounds in an effort to boost the millennium exhibition's seriously flagging numbers.
An appearance on the Den children's programme might, he hoped, create enough pester power to persuade Irish families to visit the Dome before it closes on December 31st.
To date no amount of pestering has persuaded the British public. With less than three months to go, only 4.7 million people out of a projected 12 million have visited the much-hyped exhibition.
"It's pray and fight," he says with Gallic panache when describing his current approach to boosting numbers.
Right from its less-than-glitzy opening party, the £800 million Dome seemed doomed. Hundreds of A-list celebs and, worse, influential London media types found themselves stranded for up to three hours on a Tube platform waiting on New Year's Eve as they tried to make their way to the event.
The ensuing headlines were the start of the bad publicity which was swiftly followed by stories of two-hour queues, expensive ticket prices and dull, if worthy, exhibits.
At the end of January Mr Gerbeau was head-hunted from Disneyland, Paris to turn the Dome around. One of his best-known master strokes there was creating the "Space Mountain" ride which soon became the main attraction. He hasn't had the budget to create any such crowd-pleasers in the Dome.
Mr Gerbeau says that if he was starting from scratch, only half the current exhibits would stay.
"The media are killing us," he says. "You never read anything positive about the Dome, which is easily the most popular paying attraction in Britain."
Part of the Dome's failure is, he says, over-expectation. "There was never going to be a market of 12 million for the Dome," he says. "I don't know who came up with that figure but I wasn't 24 hours in the job before I realised it was impossible."
Whatever happens, the Dome will close on the last day of this year and Mr Gerbeau will be out of a job. Such is his faith in its potential as a tourist attraction that he is considering attempting to lead a management buyout. "Well," he says, "who is going to take the risk to employ the guy who ran the Dome?"
