Olympic thoughts

I’ve been pondering the Olympics opening ceremony since I watched it. To be fair it was about a billion times better than I had been expecting which wouldn’t have been too difficult mind. What I was expecting was basically Boris on a zip wire with some cheap union flags. 

Cripes!

Which was a lovely bonus to get yesterday admittedly.

The main problem with the opening ceremony, apart from 100% too much McCartney, was that it didn’t fit my internal view of what it is to be British.

We all have different internal views of what being British means, and the world has various views from perfidious Albion to whinging Pommes via various imagery featuring policemen, beefeaters, taxis, James Bond and telephone boxes and other easily condensable concepts.

This is most assuredly not how I see us, defining exactly what I do see us as is more complex but an excellent illustration of what it might be came to me yesterday whilst in a two hour conference call about web services and interface documentation.

It’s Dr WG Grace and Rupert the Bear fighting a Martian Tripod to the strains of PigBag’s “Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag” played by the massed bands of the Guards.

The distilled essence of Britain

To be fair some of this has been done before, the most excellent Alan Moore touched on Rupert’s relationship with the Martians in one of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books. But that doesn’t detract from the impact of the image.

Picture it, its 9pm, darkness over London, all that Green and Pleasant land bucolic nonsense starts up in the stadium and just as the viewers start getting really bored a 500ft tall animatronic Martian tripod steps into the Stadium and vaporizes them all with its heat ray. All looks lost but then with an appeal to the ancient gods of London, the strains of Papa’s got a brand new PigBag are heard from Horseguards and two bright loci of light show where the two champions selected to defend London are being summoned. Over at Lords and at the old Daily Express building on the Strand our two defenders are brought onto the field. 300ft tall animatronic figures of Dr Grace and Mr The-bear stride towards east London to save the games from the Martians. Meanwhile the massed bands arise at other key points such as Greenwich park, Wembley stadium and elsewhere to combat further Martian cylinders and to carry the entertainment outside of the stadium and away from the eighty thousand or so corporate functionaries, apparatchiks and twelve normal punters inside. 

You can just see it in your minds eye can’t you?

Now I'm not saying it’d be cheap or indeed easy to do this, we’d probably have to use zeppelins and a lot of OTT puppeteering to do it and the budget would be enormous, but imagine the headlines the next morning, imagine the look on people’s faces as they are reminded what we are really all about.

• Not Jerusalem
• Not heavy engineering
• Not tuxedos
• Not pomp
• Not circumstance

No, what we are about is a hard drinking, heavy set man with a cricket bat, flailing at fictional monsters in the darkness, whilst his childhood imaginary friend cheers him on to the tune of semi forgotten post punk music. And winning.

Forget that at your peril.

*I know I haven’t posted in ages, the urge to broadcast random thoughts into the ether had declined, but it is back for the moment, enjoy.