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“Opening and closing ceremonies ought to be banned.
Absolute bloody nuisances. I have been to one that was
absolutely, appallingly awful.”
The Duke of Edinburgh to The Daily Telegraph, May 2006
The photograph above has graced my kitchen wall for
many years. HM Queen Elizabeth II is opening the new
fangled trunk call service by making a call from Bristol
to Edinburgh - the furthest possible in 1958 without going
through the operator. It is a simple occasion, a couple of
posh chairs and a table dressed up with a few yards of
satin but just look at the smiling faces.
Things are less simple now. Getting on for three-quarters
of the world's population will either watch the London
2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony on Friday 27 July or
at least see something of it in news bulletins and replays.
Three-quarters of the world’s population! Will what
we offer them be enough? Will we have spent enough?
In the 1970s my mum, sister and I would “do our hair”
and put on long dresses and dad would spruce himself up
with a blazer and tie and we would all go and watch the
British Television Premiere of South Pacific, or The
Sound of Music, on Aunty Lita and Uncle Jeff’s colour
telly in Woolwich. Aunty Lita would lay out a buffet for
the interval loaded with riches I had never met before –
foods with strange names from the exotic end of the
alphabet: vol-au-vents, quiche and pretzels. So I am no
stranger to the special television occasion but this will
be my first Olympic Opening Ceremony. By contrast my
colleague here in the City & Village Tours office, Raman
(rhymes with salmon, he looks after our schools, corporate
clients and computers), loves an Olympic Opening
Ceremony. Raman watches opening ceremonies in
the spirit of Aunty Lita’s Telly Premieres.
Diligently and with buffets.
Munich 1972, Raman’s first Olympics, was two hours
of blazers on parade followed by a mariachi band in
homage to the ‘68 Mexican games and a bit of lederhosen
and thigh slapping. The Queen opened the 1976 Montreal
Games in a stadium that wouldn’t be finished until 1988
and wouldn’t be paid for until 2006 for games best
remembered for the Nadia Comăneci perfect tens.
Moscow 1980 was really the start of the grand artistic
display. Soviet military might meets Busby Berkeley.
Moscow also used impressive card stunts where designs
are created and changed in an instant by orchestrated
crowds turning over coloured cards. Previously card
stunts were little known outside the United States.
Four years later and determined not to be beaten at their
own game by the Ruskies, the Americans pulled off a
spectacular card stunt where the entire stadium audience
held up cards left on their seats to form the flags of every
Olympic nation. In that low-tech age of yesteryear card
stunts were the bee’s knees. Now although they may be
alright for football matches they’re a tad old-fashioned for
the modern Olympics. A bit Ceefax in an internet world.
Raman was really hooked by the 1984 Los Angeles games
with its Olympic sky rings, the 84 grand pianos belting
out Rhapsody in Blue and, every boys dream, the rocket
man in the flying space suit. He remembers the horror of
the doves burned alive in the flames of the Olympic
Cauldron at Seoul in 1988. He gasped in astonishment in
1992 when the Paralympic archer fired a flaming arrow to
light the Barcelona cauldron and felt a lump in his throat
when the ailing boxer Muhammed Ali lit the flame in
Atlanta in 1996. He can tell you that the Sydney
Symphony Orchestra were miming to the colourful Great
Barrier Reef displays and lawn mowers in 2000, the year
that the Taliban banned Afghani athletes from attending.
Opening Ceremonies Through The Ages
From Babylon to Boris Johnson