One of the best things about Boomtown is the weird and wonderful places you can stumble into late at night.
Although perhaps nothing can challenge the mind-frying mystery of last year’s near-insane Prawnucopia Lounge, this visit to a bizarre doctor’s surgery on Saturday night was certainly an unforgettable experience.
Accessible through an unmarked door, visitors were instructed by a nurse to tarry in a waiting area before the doctor could see them for a consultation.
As ever, the attention to detail was remarkable.
A patient broke into our consultation and had to be forcibly removed.
Visitors busy themselves in a room full of balls.
The nurse’s station dispensed prescriptions.
In the padded cell.
A rather unhappy chap was found chained to his bed.
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Padded cell?? WTF? I thought we had left those sort of stereotypes of mental illness behind 20 years ago.
Shame on you, boomtown 🙁
Looks like you missed the rather obvious Victorian theme to the room, then.
Even so. I’m not at all happy about things like padded cells being used for entertainment. And that is not a shot at you Ed but at the people who put this particular bit of boomtown on. You wouldn’t include a Black and White minstrel show or cock fighting in an entertainment show these days, for example.
That is purely because cock fighting wouldn’t be performed in a mental institute. To reassure you our team had great respect for mental illness as I’ve personally experienced mental health issues both personally and with people close to my heart and although I cannot speak for the rest of the crew in entirety it is something respected greatly and discussed at great length. Therefore even more important to approach the topic in a lighthearted yet sensitive way appropriate to the time period the area was set in.
Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. However I still don’t agree that padded cells and patients chained to beds is an appropriate subject for humour. Hopefully you’ll do something different next year.