Almost the best thing about Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony was the running Twitter commentary. From Marcus Stead: ‘Ah, here we go, NHS worship. One of the most overrated things about Britain. Expensive, unreliable, regularly lets patients down.’ From Miss Annesley: ‘I think “Voldemort runs the NHS” is the moral of this story.’ And from Mr Ranty: ‘Stafford Hospital is second from the left, the one with 450 dead patients.’
Not getting into the spirit of things is something we British do well. It’s instilled in us from an early age — usually during our first visit to the pantomime where the nasty, scary bully man on stage insists we join in with cries of ‘Behind you!’ and ‘Oh, no you didn’t!’ and all we want to do is curl up in our seat and hide until all the compulsory, communal ‘fun’ bit goes away.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy any of the Danny Boyle show. On the contrary, I enjoyed quite a lot of it. I liked: the fact that Isambard Kingdom Brunel got to have his cigar (though it seemed a lot smaller than the one he smoked in those photographs); the beatific smile on Kenneth (Brunel) Branagh’s face as the dark satanic mills erupted through the turf of the Hobbity prelapsarian idyll; the Queen gamely playing herself in the James Bond sequence; the Mr Bean — and generally I hate Mr Bean — Chariots of Fire spoof; the music.
There’s a certain type of Speccie reader who takes enormous relish in his loathing and ignorance of any popular music written after 1950. All I can say is, if you’re one of them you’re wrong. Boyle was quite right to include an extended medley of British pop from the Beatles through ‘Tubular Bells’ to punk and dance because, like it or not, this is one of those few things at which we remain utterly world-class.
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