A ticket blunder has hit tonight's opening of the Millennium Dome in London, with about 3,000 of the 10,500 invitations not having been posted due to administrative problems.
All guests attending the glittering first night, in which Queen Elizabeth will formally open the £758 million Dome, should have received tickets through the post before Christmas.
Organisers of what had been billed as Canada's "biggest indoor millennium party" were frantically contacting 2,000 would-be partygoers yesterday to tell them it was off. The party attracted just 2,000 ticket buyers, compared with the 15,000 organisers had anticipated.
With an Eiffel Tower that appears to take off at the stroke of midnight, then a chain of giant rotating cog-wheels down the Champs Elysees, France's instinct for the grand gesture will not be lacking on millennium night.
At three minutes to midnight, the Eiffel Tower will erupt in a blaze of illuminations, announcing the start of celebrations. The display reaches its climax at midnight, with the tower giving the impression of lifting off thanks to horizontal banks of lights lit up in succession.
After weeks of heated arguments, organisers of Berlin's massive millennium light show have exorcised the ghosts of the Nazi past and will now mount a new politically correct show.
Organisers of the exhibition - a high-voltage concentration of 250 floodlights that can send their beam 30 km into the sky - said yesterday the show would go on.
The original idea, to use the lights to highlight the Goddess of Victory statue, was abandoned. "It was a very striking aesthetic, but unfortunately it had these Nazi parallels," a spokeswoman said. "The city knew this would be seen across the world so one has to be very careful."