DAY NINETEEN - Let the Games begin!

Came home to my friendly ménage à trois neighbors (please see Wiki for the more contemporary usage) in the living room chatting with Sandra -- as ordinary as you please. Malcolm, the master you-name-it-I-can-fix-it was working on a number of projects, while Michael, master of all things electronic, I found out soon enough, was laboring over installing our recently-delivered Wifi package. Hurray, after several hours, success! None too soon, either, as my shoulders are really aching from lugging my computer all about town several times every day. You would think a little old computer would weigh nothing, right?! (I have since discovered that the internet service we have is very much like the old original cell phone plans in which you could make long-distance calls only in the evening hours without incurring an exorbitant fee, and this continued until 8 o’clock in the morning when the main usage returned again to the business sector; whereas, in our case, it is in the reverse. Around 9pm, poof! off it goes, tidy as you please, till back on it comes, bright and early the next morning, good as gold. Curious.)

The Olympic Games began today with Opening Ceremonies up tonight, scheduled to begin at 20:12pm. Cool, huh?! (Here in England we are on military time, just so ya know.) And the nice thing was that in THIS country they want to make the Olympics as much a part of everybody’s life as they can, so WE got to see the opening broadcast live on TV. So there!

Wow, wow, a lot of work – all that choreography and all those amazing performers! Really beautiful, and phenomenal!! (So much so that I can hardly do it justice in describing it, so I will leave it to the expert. See below.) And then there were the fireworks to top off the production. Oh, man! They are so much fun to watch. (Of course, they’re always more fabulous in person, but seeing as how the remaining tickets were going for £1,600 – 2,012, I myself opted for the telly. And quite happy to have that as an option to choose from!)

According to the byline of the Telegraph, London’s major daily, The Opening Ceremony was bonkers, bold, brilliant – and so British. From flying cyclists and flaming petals to a parachuting Queen, Danny Boyle’s £27 million showstopper was an electrifying experience. Here’s the British sentiment as regards the whole of the enchilada, as very adeptly reported by Cole Morton, from inside the stadium:

              The first cheer was for the cows. A pair of them, swaying into the Olympic stadium at the head of a loose line of sheep, goats and geese with a shire horse behind. This was a long time before the start of the biggest show in the world, but thousands of us were already in our seats, unable to stay away. We cheered for the barmy, brilliant sight of cattle wandering into a patchwork of fields at the centre of the arena where later javelins will fly, to take their place among maypole dancers and cricketers in a recreation of the “green and pleasant land” of William Blake’s Jerusalem (Remember when I alluded to this British musical favorite in an earlier blog? Had a listen yet?).

There would be many far bigger spectacles to come over the next four hours of the opening ceremony, which was a jaw-dropping, dizzying display of bold and funny Britishness. We might not be able to summon up the massed ranks of a huge army as China did four years ago, but the show director Danny Boyle was out to prove that the British had more than enough wit and imagination to match their might, thank you.

               Some had spent thousands on a ticket, but that simple early moment with the cows showed that the stadium crowd were a warm, generous lot who “got” what Boyle was trying to do. Even the Queen was in on it, to a staggering degree.

               How many heads of state would allow the mickey to be taken out of them as Her Majesty did, to mark her arrival on one of the most important nights of her reign? She had taken to acting for the first time in her life to film a comedy sketch at Buckingham Palace with Daniel Craig as James Bond, and the pair of them were seen on screen flying down the river towards the stadium.

               We heard the sound of a real helicopter above our heads and looked up to see a pair of red, white and blue parachutes falling slowly, one with a man in a familiar dinner jacket and the other supporting a lady of a certain age in a long peach dress. And then – moments after her stunt double had landed in the Olympic Park – the Queen appeared in person in exactly the same dress. It was both a belly laugh and a wow, a moment of magic and majesty, a time to blink back tears and say, “Only the British could do that.”

               My head felt as if it would burst, and not just at the surrealism of it all. There was something very personal about all this, something that brought goose bumps and nearly tears. As a child, this was where I played. On the site of the stadium. Riding my bike through the landscape that politicians like to refer to as a wasteland. Yes, there were fridge mountains and scrapyards in those days.

               Yes, the ground had been toxic in places but there were still people making their lives there, running businesses, surviving and some thriving. I knew them. I loved the wildness and strangeness of it, as a teenager. As a man now, sitting in a seat millions would covet, I struggled at first to take in the enormity of the change. With the stadium lights flashing, it was as if an alien mother ship had landed on my old playground. We will have to see whether the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, as it will be called, will be the glorious public open space that is promised as its legacy, but on Friday night all cynicism was suspended.

               Perhaps it felt different to those watching on the television, but in the stadium the mood was electrifying. The Red Arrows roared overhead and Bradley Wiggins appeared in the yellow jersey of Britain’s first Tour de France winner to ring the biggest harmonically tuned bell in the world. As that rich, deep sound rang out, some of us felt, “It’s going to be OK. We’re not going to look silly here.” That’s the way the British think, at our worst. We cover our backs. At our best, we dare to do daft things for the sake of the good that might come of it, and that was what Danny Boyle did with his £27 million budget.

               For the first trick, he banished the rural idyll to bring in the Industrial Revolution with a mighty clang. Sir Kenneth Branagh appeared in a stovepipe hat as Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the slopes of the Tor, speaking the words of Caliban in The Tempest: “Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises/ Sounds, and sweet airs.”

               Birdsong that had played so peacefully over the million-watt speaker system gave way to the rising sound of drums, played first by Dame Evelyn Glennie with her hair whirling wild, then joined by many others in a thunderous rhythm. We were safe, we were in a show, but the music made it feel dangerous and even a little scary in that dark stadium, as chimneys pushed up from beneath the fields, belching smoke. The drums roared and factory workers drove the farm hands out. Five massive Olympic rings rose from the foundry on invisible wires, glowing red hot and sending out a waterfall of golden sparks that was reflected around us. I could smell the forge and found myself applauding wildly, excited at the sheer spectacle.

               So many people were swarming across the arena now, thousands of them. The great British tradition of volunteering was never seen in a more inspiring form than among those unpaid performers, who had given hour after hour of their time to get the movements right – sometimes practicing in secret in the most unglamorous of venues, such as the disused Ford car plant in Dagenham. Some had bust their knuckles learning to drum on buckets, some had been drenched to the skin to test that their costumes did not become see-through in the rain. Of which there was happily little.

               Six hundred of the volunteers were NHS staff, dressed up like old-fashioned doctors and nurses – think Hattie Jacques in Carry On Doctor – to push huge iron-frame beds with luminous pillows and sheets into the arena, forming the letters NHS and GOSH for Great Ormond Street Hospital. This was to be a celebration of health care for all, one of the values, Danny Boyle had said, of modern Britain: “We had no agenda other than values that we feel are true.”

JK Rowling read the opening to JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, the royalties from which go to GOSH. Bathed in blue light, the face of a giant baby that formed in the arena looked spookily like a death mask, but it provided a moment to think.

               As the children lay down to rest, a strange man was making faces in the orchestra. The wordless humour of Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean does nothing for me, and Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra deserved more than a fart joke with a piano, but jokes do communicate across national boundaries.

               The same could probably not be said for the next sequence, a love story about a boy and a girl who fall in love and woo each other through text messages and social networks. And what do they know in Tashkent or Timbuktu of Michael Fish and the hurricane of 1987? Have they ever danced to Tiger Feet by Mud? Danny Boyle didn’t seem to care as he celebrated British pop and television culture from the Fifties to the present day with a rapid montage of clips and sounds.

               This time the wow came from the music, and it was the angry sound of the Sex Pistols, whose Pretty Vacant was allowed to play and play. I was 11 when that came out, and living nearby, and when my Nan looked at Johnny Rotten snarling on Top of the Pops she asked, “You don’t like that, do you dear?” No, I said, meekly, but inside I was saying yes, yes, yes. And now here were the Pistols blaring out in the face of Her Majesty, the woman of whom they once sang, “She ain’t no human being”. Was this disrespectful to our national Nan? Nah. It was bold and affectionate, because when the Queen agrees to be seen jumping out of a helicopter you can do what you like.

               We’re cheeky, the British. We push it. But we also know when to pay respect, and there were several attempts at that. The faces of friends and family who could not be there had been sent in by the spectators and were projected on to the screens as Emeli Sandé sang Abide With Me so delicately it almost made the heart stop. As she did so, a young boy danced under the spotlight, trying to get through to his father, as dancers in scarlet enacted the struggle between life and death. A few seats away, one of the animators whose job it was to get us all physically involved was just standing there, tears on her cheeks.

               How would Boyle make the 90-minute parade of athletes from all nations interesting? The answer was he didn’t - although the soundtrack was set at a cracking pace to make them get a move on. Great Britain came last, at last, to a roar of approval. Sir Chris Hoy waved his flag without a holster and made it look like one of those little plastic Union Flags that greeted the torch on its journey around Britain.

               We needed another spectacle now and we got one, as cyclists wearing glowing white wings and dove tails encircled the stadium, a tribute to the tradition of birds being released to mark the opening of the Games. Then one rose on invisible wires and flew up to the roof. Another wow.

               After the obligatory speeches came the final act, the lighting of the flame. Would Boyle produce an iconic moment to rival the flaming arrow of Barcelona in 1992, or even the trembling hand of Ali in Atlanta? Yes he would, in a style that blew away all the speculation about which sporting icon would do the deed. David Beckham was kept outside the stadium, bringing the torch up the Thames in a speedboat and looking like a man indulging all his own James Bond fantasies. Sir Steve Redgrave, Daley Thompson and Dame Kelly Holmes only watched among other great British Olympians as seven young athletes carried the fire to an enormous ring of copper petals representing each nation. One flared, then another, until nearly 200 bursts of light rose on stalks that were almost invisible. The Olympic movement can be insufferably pompous, as if the ritual around the gathering of athletes every four years was part of a religion, but after all the gags, stunts and loud tunes, Boyle and his team now provided a moment of soul. The fiery petals came together in one enormous flame, the heat of which I could feel on my face. “This is for everyone,” the electronic display had said, and it felt true.

               Who lit the flame? Nobody famous. The icons stood aside. (There had been a good deal of speculation on the talk shows regarding who the chosen hero was apt to be. The favorite was Roger Bannister, named perhaps the greatest British Olympian of all times. Now in his eighties, he was the first to break the 4 minute mile. Sounds like a winner to me!)

               What did the rest of the world make of it? Who cared, frankly? For us, at the start of our Games, paid for with our money, it had been a moment of triumph. Bonkers, yes, and patchy in parts, but overall, brilliant. Danny Boyle had showed us at our most generous, inclusive, self-deprecating best. “And in the end,” sang Sir Paul McCartney – as this opening ceremony had showed – “the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

What more is there to say?

(By the way, appears that Google doodles is going to highlight a different major competition each 
       day - for all 16 of them!)

Photos_

                      

1- opening ceremonies wow

2- beach volleyball (had an email from Steve Taggart that read, have been enjoying your blog, though one photo made me wonder if I had misunderstood what what the British meant by "cheeky")