An Olympic Anniversary

 On this evening 14 years ago, I was watching, aghast, the television coverage of the London Olympics opening ceremony. My memories of it are mercifully vague, though I do of course remember the James Bond stunt with the Queen, all those nurses prancing about in celebration of that envy of the world, our NHS (which the Man in the T-shirt now assures is about to collapse, unless Social Care is sorted out – good luck with that, Andy). And naturally there was much celebration of the arrival of the Empire Windrush – the greatest moment in our postwar history – and somewhere along the way Kenneth Branagh in a stovepipe hat as Isambard Kingdom Brunel – and was Mr Bean there somewhere? Enough – I'd rather forget. Writing the morning after, I think I was actually quite generous...   

'It was the poor old Queen I felt sorry for – obliged to participate in that puerile James Bond stunt, then sit through yet another dreary pop concert and an endless parade of grinning athletes. You could see she wasn't really enjoying it, not the way she enjoyed the Jubilee flotilla – or Epsom, come to that. She must have been thinking wistfully back to the 1948 Olympics, and wondering where it all went wrong...
  As for the content, such as it was, of Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony spectacular, this came across (to me at least) as little more than a sentimental, politically correct primary school History lesson - appropriately enough for a Games whose logo was clearly the product of a primary school design project. Yes, the Boyle extravaganza was bold, brash, bizarre, bonkers, and a truly astonishing technical achievement. But to me it all had a weirdly post-apocalyptic feel, as if the survivors of some great collapse had come across a machine whose levers they could press to make it work – but they no longer knew what it was for, what it meant. It seemed the expression of an absence, a loss – but executed in the most extravagantly triumphant and positive terms. Very very strange...'

The dear old Queen was also probably reliving the horror of the equally extravagant, bizarre and empty spectacle of Millennium Night at the Dome, on which occasion she was surely wondering what had gone wrong since the Festival of Britain back in 1951, when her country still had a proper, historically informed sense of itself. Ah well, those days are gone – and so is our Dear Old Queen, alas...