Jeepers, was that a mess of an opening ceremony for the 30th Summer Olympics in London!
Talk about a mish-mash of the most bewildering, confusing and at times utterly stupid set-pieces, very few of which worked, never mind made any sense.
So, in the midst of the mess, what did work? Well, I did think that the rings of molten steel gliding in the air and coming together above the field looked quite beautiful, as shown below:
And Rowan Atkinson did quite an amusing stint on synthesizer in Mr Bean mode as Simon Rattle conducted the ever-rousing theme to Chariots of Fire.
But when a silly schtick by Mr Bean is amongst the best moments of what is the biggest show on Earth, then one has some idea of just what a crap opening ceremony it was.
That big grassy knoll of overgrown emerald green grass slap bang in the middle of the arena was disconcerting to say the least (grassly knoll pictured below - even the flags look forlorn). But it was the opening scenes that really set off the ceremony on such an awkward, even embarrassing tone. The grim, grey, wretched past of Victorian England was paraded before all, replete with people playing cricket on a village green (imagine!) being overrun by grimy, grim, grey workers invading the pitch like 19th century football hooligans. The look was tacky Dickensian, and hardly the stuff of an opening ceremony.
That grassy knoll and undulating patch of unkempt grass has to be the worst production design I have ever seen this side of The Ten Commandments.
Kenneth Branagh strutted around in a stovepipe hat looking eerily similar to Abraham Lincoln, all cheesy grin and put-on awe - a bland actor for a bland ceremony.
And as for that toe-curling paean to the National Health Service with the field strewn with children in pyjamas atop huge beds being pushed manically by nurses in 1940s garb on cocaine - what the hell was THAT?! I loved the delicious irony of the NHS being praised with such reverence at a time when it's being slashed to nothing by the Tory-Liberal government.
And what was that neverending schtick with Daniel Craig as James Bond picking up the Queen at Buckingham Palace in a helicopter and then the two of them 'flinging' themselves over the stadium? And as for the ever-gormless David Beckham speedboating up the Thames with some hussy clutching onto the Olympic flame...enough said...
The British really have lost all sense of self, never mind irony.
The dance-music routine was another mess, this time of incoherent, dull choreography through the decades set against only half-interesting salutes to British cinema projected on an odd-looking house - never before has the centre of an Olympic arena looked so middle-class homely.
The rest was either dull, silly or downright stupefying. And I couldn't be bothered to go over it all. Rather let me quote an anoymous poster on a discussion thread about the opening ceremony on Yahoo:
"I have to say, the London opening ceremony was rather underwhelming, an incoherent hodgepodge thrown together haphazardly. Watching it was akin to observing a pool of damp vomit: oh, there are some corn kernels in there, and some pasta, and that must be the avocado I had for dinner last night, and the white stuff must be swiss cheese. The coup de grace was Sir Paul McCartney looking like an old lesbian and singing like a turkey with laryngitis... Just awful. Between watching it and getting conjunctivitis, I'd choose the latter."
Hear, hear.
And I didn't even bother to stick around for the fireworks at the end - and I am an absolute sucker for a good fireworks show. That really says it all.
I kept imagining how the Paris Olympic Bid Committee (Paris came 2nd to London in the Olympic voting in Singapore in 2005) must have felt as they watched the goings-on from London:
'Mon Dieu...and we lost against zees?! Merde!'
Sacre bleu indeed.
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