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Eiffel Tower: Building The Impossible review: How furious Parisians nearly gave the Eiffel Tower a saucy makeover, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Did you see the French National Orchestra dripping wet in see-through plastic ponchos, and that grand piano filling up with water like a rain barrel?
Geraldine James, narrating Eiffel Tower: Building The Impossible, revealed that Parisians hated their iron monument so much that, a decade after it was built, a competition to cover it up was held, to coincide with the city's 1900 World Fair. This entertainingly quirky documentary combined archive footage with CGI stills to tell the story of Gustave Eiffel, a visionary engineer who made Isambard Kingdom Brunel look like a bloke who did a bit of tinkering in his shed at weekends. One professor took us to Vietnam, once a French colony, to show how two of Eiffel's early bridges have survived the war and still span the river in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.
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