The Worst Show Ever, 2025

I normally wait some time before writing a show review – that’s partially because I want to digest what happened, and partially because I can be quite lazy about it. I didn’t want to wait too long for this, because I need to make sure I remember all the details and my brain’s efforts to mask the trauma might make that difficult if I leave it too long. (If you’d like to skip the rant and go straight to the models, click here. But you’ll be missing out on some A-grade invective.)

The World Model Expo in Versailles was the worst model show I have ever been to, and by quite a margin.

I’ve been to IPMS-type shows in decaying church halls where old men coo over each other’s models and glare mistrustfully at anyone under 50 for being too young to understand the importance of a flanged screw bolt on the T-17A, and those shows were more enjoyable.

Before I get into the detail, I should note that there’s some things even the show organisers couldn’t get wrong or ruin: painters meeting up with painters. The best part of any show is meeting up with friends, meeting new friends, and talking crap about models. I can’t imagine what you’d have to do to get that wrong, but I’m sure it was on a list somewhere and the organisers just forgot about it.

So, despite everything else, I had a lovely time catching up with friends and chatting to people.

So, back to the World Federation and its culpability for some of the issues.

What particularly annoys me about the World Federation is that, for an organisation that wants to claim the right to declare something a World Model Expo, they’re stuck firmly in the past. The system of categories and classes is dated and confusing. If you started modelling in the 90s or you’ve spent a lot of time at old-style shows, I’m sure a lot of the distinctions make sense. If, however, you came to the hobby later or via fantasy shows like Golden Demon, they make very little sense and usually aren’t explained.

For instance, why is ‘diorama’ solely a scale modelling category (which usually means that you need to have a vehicle or similar in it)? I go to these shows and see that figure dioramas are usually put in the open figure categories. But it’s almost never explained until you get it wrong or figure out who you can ask. Lots of shows are guilty of this.

The World Expo only noted that box dioramas should go in the open figure categories, which, by following the maxim of the exception that proves the rule, suggests that all other dioramas must logically go in the diorama category. I know at least one person who put their figure dioramas in the ‘diorama’ category because they fairly sensibly assumed that’s where they belong. I’ve seen the same in the ‘sci-fi’ category: figures rather than scale models (which also leads me to the point that ‘scale model’ is also horrifyingly general, and the alternative ‘ordnance’ seems to propose that it’s solely a military hobby, which I think is an awful thing to suggest).

Why do these misleading terms persist? Why can’t someone in the World Federation sit down and take a proper look at not just the names of the categories but the current state of the hobby – the things people actually model, their specific interests, etc. – and revise this? If it’s the World Expo, it should absolutely reflect the current state of the hobby, not the state as it was in 1995.

Model shows are effectively how we know what’s ‘good’ in the hobby. We sit at home and poke paint and glue at things, and maybe see some pictures online, but it’s not until you get to a show that you a) see what those other models really look like, and b) get judged and thus told whether it’s good or bad. As such, shows are really the arbiters of what ‘the hobby’ is at the moment, and I think shows therefore are also responsible for growing with the hobby, and for being welcoming and not restrictive. We’ve seen other shows bring in new types of categorisation, recognising other elements of artistic pursuit like storytelling and ambience, and so on. It’s not hard to look around and see that the world has moved on.

So, on with the disaster that unfolded in Versailles specifically. I’ll begin with ‘communication’.

From the beginning, the show was poorly communicated. They put up a website less than a year before the show, having only otherwise told people about the dates and that it would be in Versailles. The website was clearly still littered with placeholder pages (“Add your content here” sort of thing) and contradictory information – for instance, the page that said the competition would be in the town hall, while a map of the two venues stated that the competition would be at both sites. Or when tickets finally went on sale, but registration tickets for entrants were on a different page entirely.

Couple this with the ongoing insistence on French. I have no problem with them prioritising French, but if you’re running a World Expo, you should be ready to provide the same information in the modern lingua franca (see what I did there?): English. I don’t demand flawless English, or to have everything in English, but there’s really a minimum amount of information that you need to make sure is in good enough English that people can understand it.

It’s also handy if the information actually exists somewhere. Like where to go to register your models. Which was explained precisely nowhere. At most shows, you can probably get away with that because it’s all at one site, so you have signs up on the day directing people to the registration desk and where to put out their models. When you’ve announced that people with tickets to visit the show need to go to the trade hall, but not said anything about registration, you’re just inviting people to take their models to the wrong venue. Which, as everyone who was there will recall, was about half a mile from the trade hall. In summer. While probably carry some fairly weighty and very delicate models.

As such, the best information came from other attendees. We often found out that something had changed because one of our friends who speaks French read a hastily scrawled sign and told us about it. That obviously wasn’t very effective, because they had to have three separate prize giving ceremonies, and during two of them they tried to give out the same prizes to the same people who still didn’t turn up probably because they didn’t know those ceremonies were happening. I only found out about one of them because I was enjoying the air conditioning in the theatre when it happened.

As mentioned above, the show was spread across two sites. This isn’t fundamentally bad, but they were quite a distance apart, which means that if you’re at one, you need to consider the investment when going to the other. I’m middle aged and reasonably fit, but I don’t want to walk a round trip of a mile without good reason. If I was older or my ankylosing spondylitis was flaring up, that trip could be considerably more challenging. And it’s not like there are no old or disabled people in the hobby…

And while we’re on the topic of two sites… it was actually three. Which, again, no one was told about until they got to registration. Down behind the town hall was a gymnasium that had been kitted out to handle overflow of models because the town hall, when you got inside, was clearly never going to be adequate for the number of models that turn up to a World Expo. You’d need to be utterly oblivious to think that space could hold even half of the models. At least the gymnasium wasn’t another half mile away, I suppose.

Of course, all this starts coming together into a growing, tumorous morass of mistakes when you also realise that the town hall is a historic building with a stringent limit on number of people who can be inside at one time. This, of course, meant that queues to get into registration were up to two and half hours long, and similar the next day if you just wanted to look at models. Queues for the gymnasium were basically nonexistent, so I imagine most people saw a lot more of the models in there than they did of the ‘prestige’ categories up in the town hall.

So, let’s say that on the Friday you want to go register your models but you don’t know where to go. You start off at the Palais de Congres and find out that you need to walk 750 metres to the town hall. It’s approaching 30 degrees that day, but there are trees over the avenue most of the way there. But then you discover that you need to queue for two and half hours without any shade or shelter to register your models. Lucky thing that you brought a bottle of water!* Unlucky thing that you can’t use the toilet in the town hall until you get inside. You don’t yet know about the gymnasium or that there’s a toilet hidden underneath it, but tomorrow you find out about it and use it. Until they put tape over the stairs to stop people using the toilet. Because fuck you for trying to stay hydrated, and fuck your bladder in particular. (Based on many, many true stories.)

Oh, and remember how they sold day tickets for people who want to see the show but not enter? Lots of those people bought tickets for Friday and Saturday. Friday was essentially a permanent queue until about 4pm because people needed to register. Meanwhile, Saturday was judging day. Yes, judging was done during the day for four hours. At a small, one-day show, I think that’s obviously forgivable and probably inevitable. At a multi-day, international show where you’re selling day tickets to people who want to see the models, I think the vast majority of judging should be done in the evening or staggered so people can still enjoy the models (assuming they can get in, of course, because the Saturday queues weren’t much more generous than Friday’s).

But seeing models is what you go to a show for. Even if you’re the most narrow-minded, selfish, competitive painter in the world, you still want to see other people’s models. The three most important things to get right so that people can see the models are (in order):

1. Access to the venue
2. Lighting
3. Stands to ideally bring the models closer to the eye

Obviously, the queues ruined access.

There were no dedicated lights. In some parts of the hall and the gynasium, that wasn’t a terrible problem. In other areas it was a significant problem.

The ‘stands’ that they put in the hall were simply extra tables folded up and stacked on top of the other tables, so they didn’t really function as effective stands. I’m sure there’s also a health and safety warning about this somewhere, but I generally expected at least one table to collapse before the show ended. Somehow, the tables survived. There were some stands in the gymnasium, which suggests they knew that stands were necessary but just decided they didn’t need that many.

By the time we got to Sunday, I think it’s fair to say that everyone thought the worst had passed. We were wrong. The organisers still had TWO prize giving ceremonies to get through, and for at least one of them, had come up with probably the worst method of giving out prizes I’ve ever seen. I can’t even imagine the thought process behind it. For those of you who were lucky enough not to witness this absurdity, here’s how it worked:

• If you had won a highly commended, you were to come up on stage and get your name confirmed against a list and collect your pin badge.
• There were probably about 400 people who had won a highly commended (based on there being slightly more than 1000 competitors).
• There was no “come up now if your surname begins with the letters A through D” to manage the numbers.
• The only way of knowing you had won a highly commended was to see the stickers on your models.
• See the earlier issues getting into the town hall to discover if you had, in fact won a highly commended.
• Compound this with the fact that they apparently ran out of stickers, and some categories therefore had no stickers at all.

So it was entirely possible that you’d won a highly commended and didn’t know about it. And the only way to find out was to join the 400 other people queuing to get on stage where three people were sifting through long lists of names.

Before the debacle finished, I quit. I was done with the show. I know I’d won a medal for one of my entries, but I no longer cared. I was afraid that they’d do the same with the medals and take away any dignity associated with the prize. I might also have won a commended, but I was one of the people who couldn’t know if they had or not and I wasn’t about to join YET ANOTHER FUCKING QUEUE.

So, for the rest of the show, I have relied on reports, and, oh my, what a doozy followed this debacle.

The show had organised a saxophone band to play between the highly commended prize giving and the main prize giving. This might have been quite a nice interlude at any other show. But, of course, the queue was still going when the band arrived. Any sensible show would take the loss and ask the band to wait a bit and play a shorter set while they finished up giving out the pin badges. NOT THIS WORLD EXPO, MY FRIENDS.

No, rather than do the sensible thing, they opted to do the stupid and frankly insulting thing, and closed the curtain on the people still queuing. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. And the band played. As my favourite Dane, Thomas, pointed out, it felt like the band continuing to play on the Titanic.

Not content with just this insult, the abuse continued during the final prize giving as the old bigoted misogynists then went on to only thank the male judges. I am reliably informed that the specific French used was “Merci, Messieurs les juges”. But the women were remembered – we must credit them with that. Because they thanked the (translation provided by a friend) “feminine sex that accompanies us in the hobby”.

And that’s really the diarrhea icing on the lumpy, corn-filled turd cake. You can’t even stand to treat women in the hobby with a modicum of respect. They are hobbyists like us. They were judges and volunteers. They were competitors who spent a lot of money to come to the show and hundreds of hours working on their models.

And with that, the show was done. Thank god.

Was Versailles nice, at least? Yeah, I guess so. I’ve spent quite a lot of time in Versailles before, when my now wife was working there. I didn’t particularly like it at the time, and while it is a bit nicer (certainly a lot cleaner), the town doesn’t really have any appeal as a tourist destination for me. We found some good cafes and less good restaurants. There were some interesting beers. Mostly, there were my friends, and that was indeed good.

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The show was a show, however, and I did try to capture some images. As you might have gathered, it was hard enough to get into the halls, let alone stand around taking hundreds of pictures, all while sweating profusely, so I ended up just focusing on getting some pictures of my favourite models while I was collecting mine at the end of the show. Note that some models that I really wanted to get pictures of had already been taken away, so here is the slightly abridged set of my favourites:

* For those of you keeping track of the asterisk note earlier. Do French people even drink water? I feel like I spent half the weekend looking for places to buy bottles of water. I could find iced tea and milk-based drinks easily enough, but never water. What the hell? In the end, I was saved by a British trader who’d found a supermarket with bottles of water, and later on by one of my lovely Danish friends, who are clearly always prepared.