London 2012: the experts' view of the Olympic opening ceremony

The spectacle

by Harvey Goldsmith

I have spent my life doing live events, and as a spectacle the Opening Ceremony was amazing. But having attended one of the dress rehearsals, and watched the final show on television, I don't think the experience at home will have matched the atmosphere in the stadium on Friday.

Danny Boyle had such a large cast, he turned the stadium into an epic movie set. It was a people’s event. It was certainly well rehearsed, too. I normally have two days’ rehearsal for a show; they had six months.

Technically, the show was a triumph. It is difficult to create a live spectacle with so many vignettes and scenes going on at once. Details can get lost. I thought the transformation from pastoral to industrial – with the chimneys emerging from grassy fields – was pretty cool, a clever idea. As a pocket history of England, reminding the world that we started the industrial revolution, it really worked.

Everyone has gone crazy over the James Bond sequence. I thought it was a great idea to get the Queen involved, but for me it ended a bit flat. It would have been better if Bond had crawled up out of the stadium floor.

A lot of people have told me they didn’t like the NHS sequence, but I think it worked rather well. And Rowan Atkinson was bang on, too. The sequence with Mr Bean on the keyboard encapsulated our tongue-in-cheek humour very well. Was it too British? I don’t think so. We are quirky, and our humour is a great part of the country.

They could have made more of the Olympic Cauldron, though. The structure is incredible, and the idea using aspiring athletes to light the Flame – all 200 different little flames – was very clever, but it needed more of a build-up. It should have been the defining moment, with some triumphant music, and for me they could have brought the curtain down there. There’s no need for McCartney or anyone else after the Flame is lit.

* Harvey Goldsmith was the producer of both Live Aid and Live 8. His latest show, Forever Crazy, opens in London in September (www.forevercrazy.co.uk)

The choreography

by Arlene Phillips

I know how hard it is to choreograph an Opening Ceremony – I was responsible for the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002. Everything needs to be simple for the non-professionals and repetitious, but suitably dramatic to deal with the huge arena space.

Danny Boyle’s interpretation was extremely theatrical – the most theatrical I have seen – with lots of story-telling, and that story-telling was in no way lost in a stadium. It really was a theatre of wonder.

Akram Khan’s piece – the group of dancers performing under an imaginary sun – was my highlight. It was absolutely beautiful, a moment of stillness after all the busyness, and revealed why Khan is one of our prominent choreographers. Apparently the brief from Boyle to Khan was a single word: “mortality”.

The other aspect I adored was the group of top-hatted dancers during the Industrial Revolution. It was very expressive, again telling a story. And of course the lindyhopping nurses – watching them dancing was so much fun, and brought a smile to my face.

It was warm, in the way that Beijing’s Opening Ceremony – as impressive as it was – perhaps wasn’t. In Beijing, those drummers, for instance, were so driven to provide a perfect performance that you can only imagine the many hours of drilling they endured. Whereas, with our performers it was from the heart.

For a professional like myself, I could tell that many of the people dancing were volunteers – although I know that a substantial number had been recruited from various dance schools – and they did a really good job. I could spot the ones that were not perfectly on time, but it didn’t matter. It was delightful.

If I had any criticism, it would be that I think you really had to be there to get the full choreographic effect. There were a lot of close-ups on TV but I would have liked more wide-shots to constantly show the grand scale.

But Danny Boyle’s show was a masterpiece. In terms of expressing what it is like to live in Britain today – and our rich past – it was superb.

* Follow Arlene on Twitter @arlenephilips

The humour

by David Quantick

It is very hard to be funny in a stadium – ask any stand up. Harder still when your audience are multifarious and multinational.

“That would have tickled Fred Dibnah,” said my girlfriend as several chimneys erupted in fire and smoke. And “tickled” was exactly the right word for Danny Boyle’s big event. When it chose to be light-hearted – which was often – the Opening Ceremony was witty in a very British way.

Much of it worked. Nerds like myself could count the knowing Pink Floyd allusions (especially in the Harry Potter And The National Health Service Meet The Wall sequence). Older cultural historians could tut in reminiscence as poor Michael Fish once again got the weather wrong (the second tempest of the evening, no less, after Isambard Kingdom Branagh’s wry Shakespeare speech). And old punks grumbled as the more, ah, personal lines from The Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen were excised.

The Queen had enough to contend with. The initially droll sequence in which she and Daniel Craig’s James Bond met at the Palace and then took a helicopter to the Olympic Stadium did not, sadly, end in raucous laughter when her lookalike apparently parachuted into the arena. It was a broad gag that didn’t work, possibly because the arena audience knew she was already there. Audacious as it was, it felt odd.

Despite this, the event continued in a wonderful vein, full of imagination with very British humour and lindyhopping nurses – until it was time for the London Symphony Orchestra “qui interprète les Chariots de Feu”. And for the nations of the world, Rowan Atkinson as Mister Bean. Whatever your view of Bean – for me, he is like Marmite: yeasty slop – he is one of our successful exports. Physical comedy works well across nations – and indeed in a huge stadium.

It was, all in all, an extremely British, and Britishly funny, Opening Ceremony. Even the Queen must have been tickled.

* David Quantick has written for Harry Hill’s TV Burp, and is hosting The Blagger’s Guide to the Games on Radio 2, Thursdays at 9.30pm

The music

by Mick Brown

Pity Sir Paul McCartney. It was late. He was tired. Another day, another once-in-a-lifetime concert, another global audience of one billion people. It must get a bit wearing.

But still, one might have expected him to not mess up on Hey Jude. After all, he’s only been singing it for the last 42 years. Although there are times – and this was one of them – when it seems far, far longer than that.

And it had all been going so well up till then.

Not easy for Danny Boyle to plan a programme representing the ‘best of British’, from the agrarian to the technological age, that runs from the Eton Boating Song to Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’, and that pushes all the right emotional buttons.

I was sold from the opening strains of ‘Nimrod’ – even the most incomprehending member of the global audience would have recognized the essential, majestic and melancholic Englishness of the piece. But what would they have made of the themes from ‘The Archers’, ‘EastEnders’ and ‘Gregory’s Girl’?

Actually, who cares what they would have thought? This was our opening ceremony and if we want to include the Shipping Forecast and Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s paean to sexual licence, then we will.

On balance, it was a breathless and brilliant ramble through the last 100 years of British music – more than 80 song fragments in as many minutes, excluding the generic anthemic-music-by-the-yard that accompanied many of the set pieces. Or, perhaps one should say more accurately, a breathless and amiable ramble through Danny Boyle’s record collection.

Some choices were inevitable (The Beatles and The Who symbolising the Swinging 60s); some polemical (The Specials nodding to 2 Tone, multicultural Britain); some distinctly idiosyncratic (it was bracing, but rather surprising, to find not one but two Sex Pistols’ songs in the mix).

And who knew that Mike Oldfield occupied such a major position in British music history, although Tubular Bells sounded pretty as an accompaniment to the celebration of the NHS – not a sentence one would have anticipated writing in a review of the Olympic opening ceremony. Oldfield performs so infrequently nowadays that you could probably have a hip replacement done before he takes to the stage again.

Of course, people will quibble over what was missing: where were The Smiths or the Stone Roses? Where were George Formby and Vera Lynn? But Emeli Sande was so perfect singing Abide With Me that all and any reservations dissolved.

Actually, they should have finished it right there. The Arctic Monkeys would surely be nobody’s choice, except for Boyle’s, to bring such an extraordinary event to its climax. And then came Sir Paul. Make that anti-climax.

The history

By Mary Beard

Frankly, I felt like a boring curmudgeon about the Opening Ceremony. I was only watching it out of a sense of duty and not looking forward to enjoying it (except as a golden opportunity to carp).

In fact, I was converted; though not instantly. At first we seemed to be witnessing scenes from GCSE history - scenes of blasted milkmaids transforming into the Industrial Revolution - and I strongly suspected that we were in for the kind of lesson Michael Gove might set.

For it did all look like the standard narrative schools are supposed to teach, familiar and cliched - and thought I knew just what was coming next: the great men of the Victorian era, Gladstone, Disraeli, and Churchill couldn’t be far behind.

But then it began to shift. As soon as the poor struggling workers in the furnace began to forge an Olympic ring, then came four more, rising to the air and showering sparks on to the stage below – you could see that this was not history straight and clichéd.

This was playful. Danny Boyle was actually having fun with those images of Britain. And the same must have been true all along of those little Bo-Peeps in their green and pleasant land.

As it went on it got quirkier, and what really made it was the elements which were ever so slightly shocking. I never thought I’d hear the Sex Pistols played in front of the Queen. For those of my generation, that felt like a kind of triumph; a retrospective victory over history, when all those years ago their records had been banned by the BBC, not even given airtime on Radio One.

It was a bloodless victory, I guess; I don't think there were any victims, or any censors pilloried - so perhaps even more it felt like something to celebrate.

I liked 'that kiss' too - the split-second clip of two female characters from Brookside, the 90s soap opera - and what it achieved. What a great way to get the first gay kiss onto Saudi Arabian TV.

Governments are always complaining that we don’t feel proud to be British. They wag their fingers at us and instruct us to feel patriotic. But it's a rather punitive approach to history and to identity – with all that checklist of Kings and Queens we’re supposed to know, and the nasty insinuation that you aren't a 'proper' Brit unless you've read The Faerie Queene, or Merchant of Venice, or whatever.

Strikingly, Danny Boyle actually showed us that we are proud to be British.

It wasn't a parade of majesty; the only monarch who featured was our own dear Queen. But instead of one official version, the stage made room for all sorts of people and many different narratives.

It recognised all kinds of things that people care about - from Amy Winehouse to CND marches – and it let them into the story as symbols that can stand for Britain, and have played their own part in shaping our history. It was a really alert reading of what matters to people in Britain today - from JK Rowling to the NHS - and because of that Boyle managed to inspire pride where finger-wagging governments have failed.

He was able to play with the great symbols of Britain in a way that was both ironic and supportive; that takes a special gift. There are many different sorts and styles of histories. This wasn't a competition with the Jubilee, which brought us pomp and majesty, this was something different: the people's story.

* Prof Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge