The transition from water colour to oil paint has been significant “Water and wax don’t mix well,” she said “It used to be impossible to get fine detail There was one basic colour for the whole head With oil, you can put in every little freckle, dot and vein. We are meticulous about detail and the results are much better than they were 10 years ago.” The uncannily lifelike model of the footballer Eric Cantona, unveiled earlier this year, is proof of this.Julia Deane, 32, a hair and make-up artist, has seen many advances in colouring techniques since she joined Madam Tussaud’s in central London 12 years ago. The effete pose was chosen by Jarvis himself, as were his clothes (black flares and Seventies jacket).Stuart Williamson, 48, who together with the make-up team, has sculptured the waxworks for 17 years, said: “We put a lot more effort than we used to into making the models lifelike We take hundreds of measurements We even get a sample of hair if they’ll let us. Eyes part vacant, part soulful, enigmatic expression and slim limbs are taking shape. It is six months before a star is born.
The Pulp singer is only three weeks in, but is already unmistakable. Subjects now spend up to six hours at several sittings to enable the sculptor to measure and mould to perfection.

Technological advances and increased attention to detail are leading to ever more life- like models worth pounds 20,000 apiece. It is not easy to capture the wit of the singer Jarvis Cocker in wax – or any other part of him for that matter But the sculptors are giving it their best shot

In Madam Tussaud’s day, wax works were fairly crude Not now. This level of support simply would not be available if the scheme was extended nationally, which indicates that the rate of breaking of orders, which is already double that of probation, would go up, not down.”. The company later confirmed that the average number of offenders per member of staff was two.Mr Fletcher said: “A study of just 83 people is too few to make an evaluation but I think this invalidates the whole project.

According to reports from the pilot areas, Securicor staff have been called upon to perform a range of support tasks, from the fetching of a prescription or a four-pack of lager during curfew hours to counselling an offender threatening suicide. In fact, the Home Office cost “estimate” might only be feasible if the courts imposed some 15,000 tag orders a year – the level officials have suggested would be needed for private security firms to operate schemes profitably. Even excluding the pounds 1.3m likely to have been spent on start-up costs, each order has probably cost in the region of pounds 4,782.Taking an average curfew order of four months, the weekly cost would be in the region of pounds 367 a week. In what appears to be an attempt to massage the figures, the Home Office suggested yesterday that the cost of a tagging order was “estimated” at being slightly less than for an average probation order and less than half the cost of a custodial sentence of the same length.Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, said yesterday that the average cost of probation was pounds 50 a week while a prison sentence cost pounds 425 a week.A parliamentary reply on 4 December from Baroness Blatch to Lord Harris revealed that pounds 2.4m had been spent on the experiment so far. Tagging represents a useful additional sentence for courts.”Although the research, Curfew Orders with Electronic Monitoring, was never designed specifically to test whether tagging should be, or was being, used as an alternative to custody, Lady Blatch added it was a “cost- effective” alternative to imprisonment and that the research had found that some magistrates viewed it as such.This is in contradiction to the original intention that it was to be used as an addition to the existing range of community penalties, and lends weight to reports that some magistrates have been persuading potential tagees to accept monitoring or risk being sent to jail for petty offences that would not normally merit imprisonment.Alongside the emerging policy vacuum over how tagging ought to be used, an analysis of a recent parliamentary answer reveals that current costs are significantly higher than ministers may wish to admit.