please empty your brain below

s/deuce/deduce

I take it you only went to the rehearsal and not the real thing? Very DG - get the full experience without forking out £2000, much like visiting the London Prepares events (and supplying that very handy list of ticketing tips for getting into places without ending up in a 1000-to-1 oversubscribed ballot). Amazed they allowed you to take photos, though.
The message for spectators to Monday and Wednesday's rehearsals was #savethesurprise. Quite a few people took a few photos, but hopefully with the intention of not sharing them until after the main event.
I went into it with a heavy deal of cynicism, built on weeks of endless marketing crap from the official sponsors.

But I came out of it amazed. That was brilliant, and totally fitting of Britain.

Let's hope the next 16 days even begin to compare.

(I doubt DG knows regex, swirlythingy)
I wasn't going to watch the opening ceremony. I did turn it on just to see the start and ened up watching most of it. Unfortunately I missed team GB parade and the cauldron being lit as it was going on a bit and I fell asleep around the time the "P" countries were parading.

All in all I thought it was a very good show and it might be a bit of a cliche but it made you proud to be British.
I took photos at the rehearsal but kept them to myself until now.
As for the opening show, I was not to happy with the use of video segments included among the live performance, but as the producer is a film director and not a stage show producer I guess that's what he is best at. I would have picked someone like Cameron Mackintosh to produce a large scale stage musical show, and not a film director.
If I go to the see a "live" show I do not want to watch videos on a large screen, I can do that at the cinema.
I doubt if people around the world would want to see dancing and singing to celebrate a health service and hospital that they may not know of or will ever use.
More could have been made of the James Bond sequence (live though not video), his movies and books are more well know worldwide than Great Ormond Street Hospital
Maybe for the budget it was good value.
At least the flame lit up OK.
I thought it was great and captured the British sense of humour well. Obviusly some parts will be confusing to other countries, but then the same would probably be said for any nations opening ceremony, and we must remember it wasn't just aimed at them but to a British audience as well.
What happened to David Beckham and the flame between leaving City Hall and arriving at the stadium? Given the speed he was going at in the clips we saw, he would have had time to go at least to Southend and back!

And what's the speed limit on the Lea Navigation?
I was wondering if dg was hidden inside Beck's speedboat and was giving him and the olympic flame a guided tour of the east end waterways and the bow back river.
The view from abroad: the opening ceremony was brilliant! When we were watching it, though, I could tell that we were missing range and size of the spectacle by only viewing it on television. It was a great celebration of modern Britain.

I frankly loved that it was intentionally British and referenced things that are not globally known. It was the first opening ceremony I've seen that didn't seem designed by committee. The specficity and quirkiness made it more impressive than endless spectacles of interpretive dance.

What's horrible, though, is finding out this morning that we didn't even see the entire ceremony. The American tv network cut out entire portions of it for commercials, and showed nothing of the tribute to the victims of the 7/7 bombings - instead, they showed a meaningless interview between Ryan Seacrest and Michael Phelps.

That, along with incessant jabbering from the television commentators during the ceremony, means I feel like I only saw a third of the ceremony! Hopefully we can find a copy of the entire ceremony from the BBC, without the American narration.
I watched every second if it - and loved every second of it. It was ace.
Shame about Huw Edwards and co commentating. I switched to the web stream for a while where there was no commentary. When the athletes started to parade, Huw went into reading his script (Wikipedia)and I went to bed.
Loved the opening ceromany. Watched it on Eurosport HD with the excellent Simon Reid and David Goldstrum. As for today watched the sport for 12 hours. I love the 24 HD streams
Loved it, it was so British! Goosebumps moment when I saw the speedboat go up the Limehouse cut, and enter the park waterways, it all looked amazing. The fireworks were so loud we heard them in Wapping, and afterwards we could clearly see the beams of light from the towers in the night sky. I will forever rue the missed opportunity to obtain tickets for the rehearsals for residents of host boroughs, it really was a once in a lifetime event...
I agree with what Veronica said a couple of days ago; it was a shame that NBC had to be such an intrusive presence.










TridentScan | Privacy Policy