Okay, it seems as if they may have got me; after months of nay-saying, sneering and muttering – and despite the best efforts of the BBC’s disastrous coverage of the cycling today (timechecks! how the hell can you show a road race without timechecks, you morons?) – I may be joining the pod people, and starting to cheer at least selected bits of the Olympics. Despite the fact that they are most definitely the London, not the British, Olympics, and I really don’t feel that London represents me in any helpful way. Damn you, Danny Boyle.
It was the exploding chimneys wot did it. I had no intention of watching any of the opening ceremony, and brief impressions of the ‘green and pleasant land’ section seemed to confirm all my prior expectations of sanitised, conservative nostalgia for an imagined rural past, sheep and cricket and all. But I was ordered downstairs to watch “just five minutes” by the other half, and arrived just in time to identify Kenneth Branagh in top hat and whiskers – and then the whole thing exploded in the best attempt I’ve ever seen of representing the opening sections of the Communist Manifesto, depicting the immense creative-destructive power of modernity and its transformation of the pre-modern world. Despite the fact that the NHS bed jumping went on for too long, and the Abide With Me segment was dull, I was then hooked until we realised that it had taken at least half an hour to get from ‘A’ to ‘Cameroon’ and went to bed.
Marina Hyde has a nice line on the idea that this was as indigestibly and bafflingly British as Marmite and jellied eels. Up to a point; I thought Boyle had done nicely in incorporating some internationally-recognised British icons (James Bond, Mr Bean) into the event, though often in ways that sent them up, and this was at least partly about subverting some of the assumptions of the rest of the world. But most of it was indeed addressed at the domestic audience – confirming (but also sending up) some of what we think of ourselves, putting in little things that no one else is going to recognise (the theme from The Archers…) – but also subverting our own assumptions about what we are, or might be. This was above all an audacious attempt at offering an alternative myth of Britishness – and a positive alternative, something of celebration, rather than the traditional radical response to jingoistic triumphalism of emphasising the evils of empire etc.
Of course it isn’t a coherent narrative, but the raw materials of one: a set of symbols, images and icons to be set against the traditional pantheon, a different idea of the monuments of British history that should be remembered and taken as the foundation of British identity. Not an eternal green and pleasant land, but a country transformed by the Industrial Revolution – without losing everything that had gone before – and a country built on immigration rather than any nonsense about a pure white English race. The Great Men of this history were not kings and generals but scientists and engineers from Brunel to Berners-Lee (and in the case of the first, the callousness as well as the drive of the entrepreneurs came across quite clearly), but this was still more a history of the people, not the Great Men: the workers, the Suffragettes, the Jarrow Marchers, the doctors and nurses of the NHS. The cultural competition: some Shakespeare, of course, but otherwise not the obvious Jane Austen/Merchant Ivory/Heritage Britain stuff, but Kes, Trainspotting, classic sit-coms and so much fantastic music…
As a professional historian, there is of course a part of me that wants to start muttering about the dangers of a monumental history, in Nietzsche’s terms; the perils of such myths, the extent to which they offer power to those able to manipulate them, the crimes resulting from pretty well any form of nationalism or conviction of national specialness. But, as Nietzsche also notes, we can’t do without myths of some kind; they tell us who we are, they help us make sense of the world, and my preferred European identity isn’t any less of a fictional construct. If we can’t do without some sort of British identity, better one that accepts modernity rather than trying to pretend that it never happened, better one that celebrates diversity and inclusivity, better one that celebrates the ordinary people rather than the aristocracy, better one that says we should be proud of our science and engineering and welfare state and culture and music. Better one that really pisses off atavistic Little Englander MPs and their ilk. And if Danny Boyle can get me feeling even faintly engaged with the Olympics, maybe this is a new mythology of Britishness that could actually work…
Sphinx 
” Not an eternal green and pleasant land, but a country transformed by the Industrial Revolution – without losing everything that had gone before”
Actually, that’s just what it doesn’t show. It shows us a world destroyed by indsustry and replaced, rather than transformed.
I’m not sure what annoyed me more: the crypto-American assumption that history began in the 1840s, the metropolitan sneering at the countryside (which I see you don’t feel above, either), the omnipresent, mawkish sentimentality, the ‘moments of silence’ covered over with mood-music, the deification of the NHS – which whether you are in favour of it or not (I wouldn’t be alive without it) is a ridiculous, the appeal to the lowest common denominator, or the cheap laughs.
The appearance of Berners-Lee might have been excusable but for the fact that he did his revoutionary work at CERN and now lives in Massachusetts. Some celebration of Britain.
About the only parts I actually enjoyed were the lighting of the (very, very good) ‘cauldron’, and the two minutes of the dance in the middle before we got yet more sentimentalism in the form of ‘Abide with me’.
Didn’t you like it?
Regardless of our different subjective opinions about whether it worked or not – and we certainly disagree about the success of the “cheap laughs” (which I’d read as indispensable undercuttings of the ever-present risk of pomposity) and whether there was an omnipresent sentimentality (didn’t see it meself) – we can still discuss what Boyle was trying to do. I would say that the constant presence of ‘Glastonbury Tor’ was precisely aimed at asserting continuity from the rural past, and indeed insisting on its continuing centrality as the spiritual heart of everything. Which in terms of reality – speaking as someone who lives not far from Glastonbury – is annoying nonsense, but in symbolic terms I can see what he’s trying to do.
It wasn’t the BBC’s fault for not showing the time checks. They are merely supplied with the same feed that is given to every TV network worldwide. At least we had Chris Boardman using his stopwatch to try and make up for the cock up.
It’s a shame you didn’t watch the entire thing as the lighting of the cauldron was the best bit. I think they opening ceremony was brilliantly British. We had no chance of competing with China and we didn’t try either. The ceremony maybe didn’t have the scale or robotic perfection but it was much more personal. Showing respect to those who aren’t here and truly inspiring a generation. Well done Danny Boyle and everyone else involved!
I didn’t know that; presumably I’m still allowed to feel cross that they kept switching the channel? And the other commentator was pretty witless…
We could have had more of the post-industrial bit, where the chimneys become derelict, we roll up some more grass and reveal a car park; and perhaps a road rage incident. But it was good fun, and, to quote from yesterday’s Guardian, “He hoped his warm, witty, self-deprecating show would reflect a country trying to “find its level” in the world.” I’m glad Gregory’s Girl got a reference, as many middle-aged folk will remember it as the B-movie under Chariots of Fire on cinema bills the first time around, sort of doing the job that Mr Bean did on Friday night.