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I’ve been waiting for quite some time for an excuse to visit Cadbury World in Bournville and was quite excited when Vic booked tickets for us all to go.

We drove down in the morning, arriving at a decent time, which gave us plenty of time to look around.

I have to say that I was quite disappointed with the whole experience.  I was expecting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, instead I experienced something along the lines of …err… something quite different.

Once we got our tickets that we’d pre-ordered, we joined a queue with about 500 groups of schoolchildren.  We then got through the doors to the exhibition - armed with our free chocolate (well, it’s not free is is, it’s included in the ticket price).  The first part was informative - I’ll not go into details in case you intend to go.  Once you come out of there there’s an exhibition - we apeared to walk right into the middle of it, so we watched until the end and then watched it as it started again until we got to the bit we’d already seen.  The animations were pretty good - I’m not sure how they did it, but it was quite impressive.

Then on to the next exhibition.  We caught the tail end of the previous showing, so had to wait 6 minutes for it to start again and then watch it all the way through before we could move into the next room.  I’ll not tell you about the next room so as not to spoil it if you decide to go.

Coming out of there we moved into another exhibition where there were lots of monitors - some turned up really loud and some hardly had any volume at all.  Coupled with the fact that there were about a gazillion schoolkids in the same room, it was impossible to hear anything.  On the point of the schoolkids - why do they all have to go to the toilet at the same time?  We went to take Tom only to find half a school outside the toilet all wanting to go.  Aaagh.

Onwards with the tour, we went up some stairs and into the packaging area where it was forbidden to take photographs.  I don’t know why, because there was nothing to photograph.  The walls all had boxes of (I suspect empty) chocolates piled up so you couldn’t see in and where you could see in, all that was to see was a conveyor belt bringing the odd box of chocolates down to an unknown destination.  At one point we saw a human, whose role appeared to be to sit and watch these boxes disappear down a hole.

We visited all of the exhibitions, but one in particular stood out.  The Purple Planet.  It stood out for the wrong reasons.  There were a number of exhibitions but no information as to what they were.  For example, there was a row of 4 or 5 spinning shapes and superimposed onto the wall they had things like a Saxaphone, a Teapot, a Top Hat and something else.  What did it do?  How do you work it?  I have no idea.  (If anyone knows, please enlighten me, as I just didn’t see its point).  Throughout the tour there were a number of non-functional exhibitions (possibly just temporarily broken) and it was just about that point where I lost the will to live.

At the end of the exhibition, we went into Essence.  I have to say that the whole queueing thing at Cadbury World leaves a lot to be desired - when we got in we were at the back, so the kids couldn’t see a thing.  (I’ve probably been spoiled by Disney where they’d ask the adults to step to the back so that the kids could see what’s going on).

After our liquid chocolate (very tasty) we went into the Bournville Museum.  Quite interesting, but someone had their head in the way of the projector the whole way through the film, which kind of spoilt it.  So I went to the back of the room to watch the packaging robots (ahhh, that’s where the boxes were going to!).  In the time I watched them, they must have lifted about 20 packets of chocolate onto a pallette for wrapping.  A human could have definately gone faster, but having said that, there were hardly any chocolates coming down for it to pick up (the website does warn you that there are busy and slack days and gawd, this must have been an ultra slack day).

So bored to tears watching the slow-bot and not wanting to re-watch the Bournville film again because the aforementioned head was still blocking part of the projection, we decided to pack up and go home.

On the way out I heard a couple of old geezers talking and one of them summed it up nicely.  When asked by his mate what he though, he said: “It’s alright, but I wouldn’t bother coming again”.

My sentiments exactly.  And I’ll be writing to Cadbury World to let them know what I thought and what improvements they could make.  I doubt the’ll listen, but it’ll get it off my chest.