Olympics Ceremony Sketch: The Show Must Go On and On

The Olympics opening ceremony is a difficult gig. Unmentioned in any of the hype - pre, post, or during the interminable thing itself - is that 90% of it consists of people walking past wearing funny, though not especially hilarious, clothes and taking pictures of each other with their smart phones.

The Olympics opening ceremony is a difficult gig. Unmentioned in any of the hype - pre, post, or during the interminable thing itself - is that 90% of it consists of people walking past wearing funny, though not especially hilarious, clothes and taking pictures of each other with their smart phones. That the people are athletes, and that some of them are exceptionally tall - and quite a few really quite brilliantly short - does not compensate for the fact that, as an entertainment spectacle, it is roughly as gripping as Celebrity Come Dancing without the dancing.

The BBC had thought of this, of course, and equipped its commentary team with a compendium of titbits so that no nation involved in the two-hour slouchpast, no matter how obscure or frowned upon by Amnesty International, came and went without us viewers learning something about its history, culture or politics. These could be matters of import - Tunisia and Egypt, for example, both received honourable mentions for the Arab Spring - or of quaint passing interest. Did you know, for example, that Bhutan was the last country in the world to receive television and that its national sport is archery, so that presumably they are all very busy these days catching up on those Robin of Sherwood repeats.

Occasionally, however, the incessant drumming that accompanied this part of the spectacle may have drowned out the raspier sounds of barrels being scraped. One country was singled out for the fact that one of its athletes had grown up in Welwyn Garden City; or trained there maybe, or once visited its Waitrose. I forgot to note which country, but it began with A, as so many of the world's nations like to do. Only one twenty-sixth of the way through the alphabet, and already we were on to obscure Home Counties references. This had the potential to get very grim indeed, and it did.

Once each country had done its waving to its representatives in the crowd - Michelle Obama waved on behalf of the USA; there was no sign of Mitt Romney who, rumour had it, had earlier been melted down into the bottom-right Olympic ring as part of Danny Boyle's industrial revolution re-enactment - they were expected to plant the national flag into the wrinkled green tor that had been especially constructed for the occasion. This, the BBC commentator explained, was the first time this had ever happened in an Olympics opening ceremony, and he said it in such a way that glossed over the essential fact that this was the first time a wrinkled tor had appeared in such a ceremony at all. The implication was that there had been an ersatz green hill far away at the end of every athletics stadium since time immemorial, and that it was only the chronic lack of imagination on the part of the Chinese or the Australians, or any other organising committee you care to mention, that had led to national flags not being planted upon it. The other item carried and deposited by the teams was something consistently referred to by the BBC crew as a copper kettle - presumably they had been over-influenced by Boyle's reconstruction of rural idyll in which tea shoppes featured figuratively if not actually - though it looked more like a phonograph horn. The significance of these objects would appear later on in the ceremony.

The wrinkled green tor meanwhile was very much part of the early shift of proceedings. Even before the ceremony proper had got going it served as the backdrop to a musician called Frank Turner who sang a song about rock and roll saving us all. Unfortunately, it had proved incapable of saving us from Frank Turner who it was explained - as if we hadn't guessed as much already - was a mate of Mr Boyle's. Frank Turner is very big on the festival circuit informed the commentator, a brilliantly effective way of telling us not to worry because virtually nobody else will have heard of him either.

Most of us though have heard of Kenneth Branagh who declaimed Caliban's isle full of noises speech from The Tempest while standing on the WGT and dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears", said Ken, which was a brilliantly chosen image for the subsequent musical melange that took us from the Sex Pistols to Abide with Me and culminated with Paul McCartney singing out of tune. So keen was Sir Paul to get the boys and girls separately and then together singing along to Hey Jude (sadly not cutaway shots at this point to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh) that he appeared to start singing the ditty twice, so that we had 20 seconds of rather odd echo, before missing out a few bars and then getting back on track. Everybody was too polite to mention this; or it may just be that criticising Sir Paul McCartney these days is a criminal offence.

But back to Ken. These noises, he went on, had woken him up and then sent him back to sleep again. This perhaps wasn't the effect Danny Boyle was striving for, but when the great filmmaker must necessarily collaborate with inferior and unreliable artists like Shakespeare, what can you expect? Or else, it was all just an unkind reference to Gary Lineker and Sue Barker, who made a mercifully short appearance from the commentary box equipped, I know not why in this age of advanced technology, with little flesh-coloured foam microphones attached to the end of plastic strips that curved round their cheeks. The pair of them looked as if they were suffering from an advanced case of the Danny boils. Soon enough they cut away to a pre-recorded package from Andrew Marr who did, I thought, a very passable impression of Boris Johnson. He said a lot in his piece about London getting bombed which is, of course, what everyone wants to be thinking about in the next couple of weeks.

The "Isle of Wonder" theme which was Boyle's thing, seemed to consist of three phases. There was the rural idyll bit, when Thomas Hardy maids threw apples at each other and the sheep tried not to look too worried, the horny handed sons of toil bit, when the Olympic rings got forged for the ceremony's money-shot, and lots of men danced around in stove-pipe hats, and then the modern culture section, a loose and largely structureless assemblage of British music, films and situation comedy extracts. Sadly, no space was reserved to celebrate the UK's - and London's in particular - more recent strength in financial services. Unless of course all those bits of paper raining down on Team GB as it marched through was supposed to be representative of bankers' bonuses.

Much of it was fun and original. The Queen did a bit of acting and Bradley Wiggins - can there be a more perfectly constructed name for a British sporting champion - rang a bell. The fact that Chariots of Fire is one of the most tedious pieces of music ever composed was cleverly disguised by having Rowan Atkinson lark around in the middle of it.

Somewhere in the midst of all this was Mr Boyle's surreal homage to the NHS involving a lot of nurses in old-fashioned uniforms dancing around a lot of hospital beds - another feature of the NHS that you don't tend to see around any more. The children involved in this tableau were supposedly real patients from Great Ormond Street, in which case I am glad to say that they appeared to be in remarkably good health. No doubt some pen-pusher this morning will be demanding to know why they can't all be discharged. It was at this point of the proceedings, presumably, that an idiot Tory MP called Adrian Burley took to Twitter to denounce the whole show as left-wing claptrap. If only after the Olympics and the Paralympics we had the Prat-o-lympics, Mr Burley would be assured of gold.

Still, if there was indeed a healthy dose of liberal correctness about the whole thing, one can hardly be surprised. Or short of examples. No church was apparent, for example, in Mr Boyle's portrayal of rural England, which I can forgive, though not the missed opportunity of plucking the Archbishop of Canterbury from the obscurity of the stands and pairing him up with Mr Bean for an impromptu performance of The Two Rowans. Later on the Olympic flag was carried in by such luminaries as Doreen Lawrence, Shami Charakbarti, Director of Liberty ("we salute her integrity") and Sally Becker, Goodwill Ambassador for Children of Peace. As the announcer walked us through the names of the flag-carriers, somehow we could guess that there wasn't going to be a corner reserved for, say, Dr David Starkey, or for Donald Rumsfeld.

Right-wingers like Mr Burley would have to content themselves with Seb Coe, a former Tory MP, though since he is also the chariman of the games organising committee, it would have been hard to keep him away. They should have tried harder. Back on the wrinkled tor, Seb made a speech of perfect tedium - less interesting and passionate than the oath later given on behalf of the tournament referees - whose peroration was that "one day we will tell our children and grandchildren that we did it right". After that it was a relief to hand over to his fellow Olympic bigwig, a Frenchman whose name, sadly, wasn't quite Jack Frog. Mr Frog, as I shall think of him, said that it was kind of London to host the games "yet again". The "yet again" was stressed in such a way as to suggest that Frog for one hasn't given up on the idea that London plucking this Olympiad from under Paris' nose was the kind of atrocity for which all the UN goodwill ambassadors in the world cannot atone.

And so it finally ended. The copper kettles were lit and raised into the air so that they came together to make a passable cauldron, whose carbon footprint doesn't bear thinking about. The flag was raised (Shami et al having handed over this tricky bit to a gang of soldiers), oaths sworn and McCartney came on to warble the whole thing into submission. By the time the last la-la-las had died away into the inky night, the place seemed to be already half- empty.

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