Xenia Taliotis spends a day at one of the unhappiest places on Earth.
In Wham's Tropicana, membership's a smiling face and strangers take you by the hand and welcome you to wonderland.
In Banksy's Tropicana, membership is a scowling face and strangers would sooner bite your hand than take it as they herd you around Dismaland, a dystopian bemusement park that holds a mirror up to our un-fair - of face and deed - gone-awry world.
Banksy, an artist known mostly for his subversive, anti-establishment urban murals, has gone for all-out, pitch-black humour here, creating a super nightmare in Weston-Super-Mare, UK, on the site of Tropicana, a once-beautiful, now-derelict art-deco lido where he spent many a long cold summer as a boy.
"Dismaland," trumpets the website, "is the UK's most disappointing new visitor attraction." It's the very antithesis of theme parks and dream lands and fun fairs - it's a place where an abattoir worker sits on a box of lasagne on the carousel, eyeing up the horses (a reference to Britain's recent horse-meat scandal); where the ferris wheel grinds to a halt mid-cycle; where the demented muzak is interrupted by public announcements - "private property created crime" - and where a crazed Grim Reaper disco-dances his dodgem car to the tune of Staying Alive. Or is he trying to break free from his enclosure? Dismaland is deeply disturbing in parts, and hilarious in others.
