And So It Has Started

In what can only be described as an amazing opening ceremony the Olympic Games opened earlier in London with a speech from the Queen and the lighting of Olympic the flame. The whole thing made you proud to be British for a while even if we had to take the "make do approach" due to the double dip recession.

There were so many highlights including the transformation of the countryside and the forging of the rings which looked amazing. I just loved the James Bond and the Queen spoof on getting to the games and flying the helicopter under the rings on tower bridge. Just wish the Queen had a little more time to speak. It is quiet amazing that her father and grandfather before her opened the games in the past. The lighting of the cauldron and the cauldron itself were just wonderful. It is an amazing idea and a wonderful bit of art. 

The boring bit, for me was, a load of people walking around smiling and waving flags. They looked like they had a great time, smiling away, the television commentators were wetting themselves with excitement as the spotted potential medalist, but for me it leaves me a bit cold. Looks good but it just goes on and on and on, but I guess it just part of the show and it all can't be amazing. 

Back in late nineties I was in a play called Romero and Juliet, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, directed by Michel Birch. There was a group of core actors with the speaking parts to which he added a cast of about 80 supporting young actors. At the time I could feel what he was trying to create but I never had a ture understanding or vision of what it looked like until I saw the same thing on a massive scale at the opening of the Olympic Games. Watching the first 25 minutes what was created by everyone taking part was such an impressive feat.

I thought it was interesting what  Sarah Lyall of The New York Times had to say, summing it up as a "slightly insane portrait of a country that has changed almost beyond measure since the last time it hosted the Games, in the grim postwar summer of 1948." The fact is she is so right, the Great has been taken out of Britain through the failures of successive governments and waste opportunities. 

All the same it showed we can put on a show and a good one at that, and I enjoyed it and many others did, going by the comments on Facebook and Twitter and that was the main thing, and so now on with the games.