The Olympic Opening Ceremony as Popular History and Public Enterprise; or, in your face, David Cameron

18 July 2020. Apparently, last night there was a repeat of the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, so I thought I'd revive this. It's sad, though, looking back on it. As the post makes clear, Danny Boyle's ceremony seems to celebrate the best of Britain--the parts that are proudly progressive, multicultural, and outward looking. It seems like a very different place today.   

2 January 2013. I wrote this post last summer and just add this note now in appreciation of Danny Boyle's decision to turn down a knighthood in the New Year's Honours because, as he put it, he is "proud to be an equal citizen." That of course is entirely consistent with the spirit of the Olympic ceremony that he directed. Something obviously lost on whoever decided to offer him this spurious form of recognition. Public life today is densely packed with venal people of no principle, although it has been in the past as well. But, whatever, how great it is to see a person of such talent show such adherence to principle. Yay to Danny Boyle. The man deserves a knighthood....

Back to July:      

Like many others, when I first heard what is now clear were the injudicious leaks that Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony was going to feature green fields, farms, sheep, chickens, and cricket, I indulged in the unpleasant cynicism that is the birthright of all freeborn Britons. While others made clever jokes on Twitter about large piles of burning mad cows, I made a lame effort about an entire nation pooing itself with embarrassment, my equally lame excuse for which is that I was indulging in the unpleasant scatology that is the birthright of all freeborn Britons. Watching the ceremony the other night, however, I found myself caught up in the magic of the show, entranced by the technical prowess, awed by the artistic awesomeness, seduced by the sentiments, and filled with patriotic pride. It was like I’d turned into an American, or something.

And even in the cold light of post-ceremonial reflection, I still feel the same. Sure, in a show that first featured a representation of British history, and then of modern British culture, that lasted a little less than 90 minutes and had to appeal not just to a partial but to a national and not just to a national but to a global audience, there was bound to be something for everyone but also, by the same token, something for everyone to complain about. First off, I was scrunch-faced with deep concern about the history and present state of the nation being represented largely though the medium of contempoweh darnce. Soon enough, however, the cynic in me was overwhelmed with admiration for the technical miracles achieved by the set people, as well as by the obvious artistic brilliance of the performers. Even the latter wasn’t too badly undermined by Kenneth Branagh’s adoption of the hamminess that is apparently obligatory for all Britain’s “great” actooors. On the other hand, to give Branagh the benefit of the doubt, Victorian cameras took a long time to take in enough light to make a picture, so photographic subjects had to stand still and maintain the same facial expression for a long time, and expressionless stiffness verging on sternness is the easiest apparent attitude to maintain for what must have seemed like forever for people for whom having their picture taken undoubtedly felt even more excruciatingly unnatural than it does for most of us today. So, maybe, contrary to pictorial evidence of an overly formal-looking stiff-neck, Isambard Kingdom Brunel in real life really was a nostril-flaring gurn-merchant with a theatrically shit-eating grin. 

Anyway, then I thought, well, what do I want here? Or, rather more to the point, what does the world want here? An actual history lecture? Of course not. Especially as media types today seem to believe there are only two historians suitable for big occasions. That would have meant either Starkey the Dinosaur boring on about Henry VIII, again, or, worse still, yet more nostril flaming hamminess but this time provided by the post-tumescent totem of post-imperial diminishment that is Niall Ferguson. So, really, I was pretty glad that it was an entertainer and not a historian who was paid to portray Britain on this occasion. And I’m glad too that that entertainer was Danny Boyle. We could after all have ended up with a qwhite tedious festival of twee by Richard Curtis, or, worse, of the ghastly petit-bourgeois snobbery and spite that for some inexplicable reason makes Mike Leigh so popular. But no, the working-class Lancastrian of Irish-Catholic origin who went to a Welsh University (Bangor) was the right choice to give us what we needed. 

But did he give us what we needed? I think he did. Sure, I’ve seen some people say what he failed to give us, and the historian in me knows it’s a true point if not necessarily a fair one, such as the police beating up strikers and suffragists. I myself was ultimately dashed in my hopes of seeing a gigantic Godzilla-figure in a blonde wig and a blue dress ferociously smashing down the industrial-era chimneys with an gigantic handbag. But Boyle’s mission no doubt was to come up with unifying themes we could all celebrate, given the occasion. And, given the occasion, given that consideration, he could have come up with something arse-achingly anodyne. Yet, in fact, given the occasion and necessary consideration, Boyle came up with something that struck me as highly thought-provoking and perhaps surprisingly subversive. 

First, those fields, farms, and cricket pitches were peopled by peasants rather than knights in shining armour doing their derring doo doo. Then, out of that weird hill thing at the end of the stadium, emerged industrial workers, hundreds of them, and Jarrow marchers, and suffragists, and migrants off the Windrush. Excellent—a people’s history! And on the latter point, the Windrush people for once weren’t represented as Britain’s first black people. There were people of all races in the pre-industrial part of the show too, quite rightly in a representation of a country that had a population of up to and perhaps over 20,000 non-white people in the eighteenth century. Yes, there were capitalists, the best of them represented by Brunel, if perhaps less so by Gurnagh, but the others looked a bit useless and shifty to me, waving their arms about and vaguely giving directions while the working people did the actual work of building Britain and making it what it is, right up to the hardcore steelmaking of the Olympic rings themselves. This was not unalloyed celebration, though. This section of the show was called “Pandemonium,” recalling Milton’s hell in Paradise Lost, raising the spectre of the suffering of early industrial and even some of today’s working people, and there was a Great War memorial moment, reminding us of the horror of industrialised armed conflict. But it’s also as if Boyle was saying that Thatcher might have unmade these industries, but these industries were made by these people, and so it was these people who made Britain what it is even to this very day. That Britain is about its makers, its workers, not its un-makers, its Thatchers. Prime Minister and vicious, right-wing Death-Moomin David Cameron is probably too dim to get it, but, nevertheless in your face, David Cameron.

Another in-your-face-David-Cameron moment came with the arrival of the dancing nurses and patients of Great Ormond Street Hospital. Apparently, Cameron gave out 17 tickets to the opening ceremony to “Big Society” volunteers. Seventeen. Danny Boyle gave us 600 dancing NHS staff and patients—trained, professional public servants and members of the public they serve. What a wonderful celebration of an institution that manifestly benefits all and that therefore our currently governing Eton and wannabe Eton millionaire elitists so transparently despise and want to destroy.  There are pictures of the dancers and of that hands-off-our-NHS slogan all over the internet now, daring Cameron and his bully boys to have a go. It was also interesting to see the nurses, doctors, and patients dressed in old-style uniforms and bed ware, and to see the beds with distinctly old-fashioned-looking metal frames. As if to say that this institution is part of our history, and, Cameron, if you make a speech tomorrow pretending to celebrate this celebration of British history, you’re celebrating the NHS. Of course, Cameron and his born-to-rule bully brigade will remain as arrogantly able as they always have been to pretend to respect the NHS while taking what action they can to destroy it, but Boyle has given them a warning and has given those of us who oppose them a new and gorgeous and globally celebrated totem of resistance. We will put it in your face, David Cameron. Reminder: Aneurin Bevan, architect of the NHS, described Tories as “lower than vermin.” He was correct.

The NHS, particularly in period costume, and still surviving at the point of writing, of course links the past and the present, the history and the present state of the nation. On the latter, the Boyle show was, for me, just as great and satisfying. People asked in the past how the British ceremony could top China’s, raising the rather dubious question of whether Olympic ceremonies are actually supposed to be as competitive as the sporting events themselves. Well, if one must, one can change the rules—Danny Boyle didn’t necessarily go for the faster, higher, stronger that a much larger country with a totalitarian regime’s control of people and resources can muster, but whereas the People’s Republic dubbed a child singer’s voice but replaced her in the stadium with a “prettier” example, Boyle had a choir of children with hearing-impairments and other disabilities singing God Save the Queen. Even the subject of the song herself managed to raise her facial register a notch or two above the “what the heck was thet?” expression that we know and love her for. Not that these ceremonies should be competitions for national supremacy, as opposed to celebrations of the great things all nations and peoples have. Boyle made the point himself when he said “The ceremony is very proud, but I hope in a modest way,” a point about a Best of Britain attitude that was somehow missed by those politicians and media people who bored on the following day about how Boyle showed how Britain is Best. We also had Emeli Sande doing a bonkers but beautiful version of Abide with Me, with her nose ring.  And we had Millie Small, the Beatles, the Kinks, the Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Queen, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, The Specials, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Arctic Monkeys, and Dizzee Rascal, as well as, quite rightly of course, a bit of Shakespeare, Blake, and Elgar. And he gave us a bit of a laugh at ourselves too (never a strong feature of totalitarians or Tories), with James Bond (and not just Daniel Craig but also National Treasure David Beckham speed-boating up the Thames, Bond-fashion), with “the Queen” parachuting into the stadium, and with Mr. Bean among the London Symphony Orchestra and then sending up Chariots of Fire (and, with his beach-running shenanigans, perhaps sending up the very silly British or at least English sense that we have a unique “sense of fair play”—and what better place to laugh at our darker flipside, the implication that Johnny Foreigner is a bladdy cheater, than the kick-off of the Olympic Games?). Happily, and importantly, and tellingly, Danny Boyle did not wheel out Cliff Richard. Nor did we have Elton John whoring his once-great homage to Marilyn Monroe into a brown-nosing travesty of a tribute to spoilt royalty, or any other such buttock-clench-inducing betrayal of the point of post-rock-and-roll popular music. We also had celebrations of British film and TV and of the people who watch them, and of modern communications, all ultimately personalised in the form of the internet-originating romance of Frankie and June, interestingly old-fashioned names for two very modern-looking mixed-race young people—all symbolising British people who are happily connected and united across generations and races, with no false talk of “dividing lines of...”, and scenes with sentiments far, far, far from the fear-mongering, divisive, hateful, and actually anti-patriotic cant of the Daily Mail and of David Cameron’s “Broken Britain.” 

And indeed no cynicism about the internet, portrayed here as a phenomenon that can and does bring us together far more than it divides us. Danny Boyle even had Tim Berners-Lee in the show, and described him as “the scientist who invented the World Wide Web, and even more important than that he put it in trust, made no personal gain,” leaving it “free to us all.” How different again from the Cameronian cynicism that says that the best can only be produced via motives of profit (unless it’s care of the elderly, disabled, and otherwise disadvantaged, in which the work can be done by unpaid “Big Society volunteers” with random levels of training, competence, and commitment). And that brings us back to the politics of the ceremony. Asked by the Daily Telegraph whether his ceremony was “overtly political,” Danny Boyle denied that it was overt. “The sensibility of the show is very personal,” he said “.... we had no agenda other than values that we think are true.” It seemed to me pretty clear from its contents what the show’s true values were. It was also pretty clear what the message of the method of the show’s creation is or certainly ought to be. That is, isn’t it great what Danny Boyle and his dedicated team of not-for-profit creatives, organisers, and artists could do with the investment of £27 million of public money (a sum, let us never forget, that would barely fill one board of bankers’ bonus bags with taxpayers’ bailout cash)? They certainly did a better job than the go-getter entrepreneurs of G4SClub7, the for-profit “security” firm that couldn’t spot a terrorist threat if a large man with an eye patch and hook-hands walked past them carrying a black spherical object with the word “BOMB” written on it. Thankfully, we have the (still) state-funded, non-profit-making dedicated professionals of the police force and the army to bail us out yet again from the cut-price incompetence of money-minded racketeers.  In your face, David Cameron, in your shiny, hammy, wobbly stupid face.