Prodigious Firestarters

I was pretty happy with the London Olympic opening ceremonies.  It seemed to have a good selection of British culture without having to resort to ancient history.  That's good, since the British can be like fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs: drawing pride entirely from the achievements of the distant past. They had something from just about all of modern Britain.  I heard the one guy complain there was no Doctor Who.  Actually I thought I did hear the Tardis sound effect during "Bohemian Rhapsody."  But if you're going to go into that kind of detail, I didn't see anyone from The Office or Ab Fab either.  I didn't notice any Hitchhiker's Guide reference, but then I didn't count, maybe they had 42 dancing nurses.

However, I was disappointed in the broadcast of it.  If you're not here in Canada, you wouldn't have seen the broadcast I did, but you may have similar complaints about your own broadcaster.  My main comment to the announcers would be this: Shut up.  I'm not even sure the ceremonies need commentators, other than to fill time during the interminable parade of athletes.  I know the whole thing isn't really a great work of art, but I would say that on the scale from "art" to "cheese," Olympic opening ceremonies are much closer to the art end than, say, dance numbers at the Oscars.  And yet we don't seem to need commentators there.  It wouldn't be so bad if they actually had anything to add to the broadcast.  Like say when rapper Dizzee Rascal was performing; he isn't well known outside of the Britain, so it would be nice to introduce him.  But instead, Lisa LaFlamme just assumed we didn't want to hear him and talked over his performance without any acknowledgement.  Also, when she started to talk about the author of Mary Poppins, then realised mid-sentence that she didn't know who wrote it, well that said everything about the media's talk-first-think-second philosophy.  And Brian Williams, if you feel the need to talk over the moment of silence, you've got some serious ego problems.

Earlier I joked that Mr. Bean would light the Olympic flame.  I was shocked that I turned out to be much closer than I ever expected, in that he was actually part of the opening ceremony.  Having young athletes do it was high on symbolism but low on intrigue.  The cauldron made up of the dozens of "petals" was very beautiful, but I have to say on behalf of all Canadians: Okay, we get it, we should have made sure all the torches at the Vancouver opening actually worked. 

So here's my list of other appropriate people to light the cauldron in Britain:

• James Bond, using some kind of pen laser
• A dalek, say in an attempt to exterminate David Beckham
• A football hooligan, in attempting to burn down the stadium
• A backfiring MG
• Roger Bannister, after running another four-minute mile
• A descendant of Guy Fawkes
• Or, for that matter, V (as in "For Vendetta")
• King Arthur, using The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch