Olympic Bondage

We had friends round for a curry before we settled down to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremony. We were fully prepared to rip the show to shreds at the slightest sign of naffness and the initial omens had been good. The mound suggesting England as a green and pleasant land looked like a giant cowpat from above. The Culture Secretary had made himself look a right bell-end that very morning. Rain was forecast. All of us heartily opposed the corporate brand terrorism and the frightening militarisation of what, originally, was meant to be a replacement of warfare. Rocket launchers on top of East End high-rises, I mean really. Perhaps to protect the Olympic community against unlicensed brand use?

Then again, it was Danny Boyle who was in charge of the whole thing, and while most MSM commentators focused on his Slumdog Millionnaire pageantry credentials, us middle-aged types remembered his earlier work -- greedy yuppies self-destructing over a suitcase full of drug money in Shallow Grave, heroin squalor in Edinburgh in Trainspotting, postapocalyptic chase scenes through zombie-infested central London in 28 Days Later -- there's a distinctly class-conscious, anti-establishment element to Boyle's work through the decades and I was secretly hoping that he and his team would properly stick it to the toffs, bankers and generals in front of billions of viewers.

And that's what he did. We got the great socialist anthem 'Jerusalem' -- an obvious nod to the anarchist poet William Blake -- and then the show segued into Jerusalem's "dark satanic mills", with sooty chimneys rising phallically out of the ground in a slyly ironic display of patriarchal mastery, the woods razed (an environmental message here) and scores of male and female workers slaving away with their hammers at the Olympic ring under the arrogant supervision of posh entrepreneurs in black wearing their stuck-up stovepipe hats. No newly leisured middle-class to soften the impact. It was obvious, once you got past the Tolkienesque imagery and started focusing on the crowds of workers suddenly forming into protest marchers. This was class war. Over on the Tory-leaning papers' online pages, readers' first splutters of dissent started to come in, not helped by frequent camera shots of suffragettes waving their "Deeds Not Words" placards. To think Beijing would be out-communisted by the UK!

The whole aesthetic insisted on this being a People's Opening Ceremony: there was a lot less of the usual body-fascist Riefenstahl adoration of the athletic bendy body or of carefully orchestrated, simultaneously moving ant-like armies of human clones; instead, everywhere you looked, there was either a chubby, knobbly-faced child bouncing erratically or a wrinkly old person hobbling and doing their best. There were bad haircuts, roots showing, dodgy teeth, glasses, strange beards, pretty much your average village fete attendees. It was remarkable how feminised, even feminist, the ceremony had suddenly become after the suffragettes appeared: the NHS was represented by hundreds of female nurses on the stage, and the giant nightmarish uber-father Voldemort was eventually overwhelmed by dozens of Mary Poppinses sweeping in from the sky. Some saw an underhand championing of the 'nanny state' there, the post-war consensus that tried to reconcile Victorian entrepreneurial zeal with cradle-to-grave security, and that may well be so, but I also saw a wholesale rejection of macho power in favour of a more diffuse, diverse, relaxed, less neurotic crowd, more Occupy the London Stock Exchange than Afghanistan, more Glasto's Lost Vagueness than Flanders fields. It made the concession to Conservatism -- the centre piece whereby Britain's armed forces got to do their stiff, marchy thing with a flag -- even more jarring and anachronistic.

Not sure who was behind the camera work but the Establishment didn't come off great. The Prime Minister's wife was wearing a very stylish outfit, in anarchist black and red, no less. Perhaps she knows what's coming over the hill. Her husband, the Prime Minister, looked strained -- Boyle was essentially fire-bombing about 90% of recent Coalition policies with this show. The Duke of Cambridge was perma-chatting to his wife, which is good in a way: at least they're still talking. However, the Queen, having endured the indignity of having Daniel Craig's James Bond take the mick out of her corgis and being seen to parachute out of a helicopter, seemed to scowl through the entire ceremony -- maybe she hadn't actually okayed the full sequence and was now sulking? -- and was apparently so bored she was spotted picking her nails just when the UK athletes marched in in their gloriously, fittingly blingy, chavvy outfits.

Yes, the outfits. Ralph Lauren had designed the American ones and while some referred to them as preppy or even militaristic, I saw those berets on African-American athletes and instantly imagined Black Power fists in the air and LeBron James shouting "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men!" in his best Samuel L Jackson voice.

My friend and I spent an enjoyable two hours marvelling over the more obscure nations' outfits -- beautiful and bonkers, some of them -- but I had to agree with the majority of German commentators who felt that Bogner Fashion's designs for the German Olympic team were an embarrassing combination of infantile and retrograde -- baby-blue for the men and baby-pink for the women. Nostalgic, old-fartish, unworthy of a modern country.  This for the representatives of a country whose first female chancellor now also finds herself the most powerful female anything in the world. What were they thinking?

German commentators, both professional writers and readers leaving their comments, were lukewarm about the ceremony -- many just did not get it but by the sound of it, they were also punished by particularly inept German commentators and tv directors who didn't know much about the host country and missed in-jokes and references and also excised many of the lesser-known countries' arriving delegations to instead focus on some German athlete standing around and picking his nose. Some consternation also about a shot of an audience member who greeted the German athletes' delegation with a suspiciously "militaristic" handsign, possibly channelling 1936 there. Maybe they were British: given the British obsession with all things Nazi 70 years on and given what was spouted about the presence of Commonwealth artists, singers and volunteers on some of the UK online boards and Twitter last night, you'd wonder why Brits really bothered trying to halt the invasion back in 1940.

Ever the practical-minded, party-pooping people that they are, Germans started to slag off the (I thought rather lovely) every-country-a-petal Olympic Flame: "What, are the javelin throwers supposed to throw around the Flame?" Someone helpfully pointed out that the installation would be switched off and moved to a more permanent place out of the way, which caused another miseriguts to whinge that the Flame should not be extinguished at all etc. All a bit tedious. Me, I chuckled at the thought that from a bird's eye perspective, the Flame in the middle of the stadium looked suspiciously like the bonfire of placards in the courtyard of Millbank after the students had stormed it during the tuition-fees protest two years ago. Indeed, the image of scarily fit young people setting fire to stuff will probably keep us warm, as it were, in the years to come when unemployment in now-officially-back-in-recession-UK hits Greek and Spanish levels.

OH and I, after all the heavy lifting and physical labour of the last week and a half, have taken the day off and, having followed the Olympic peloton, will now reactivate our own bikes and go for a little cycle round the countryside.