Last night in London, the 2012 Olympic Games officially got underway with what turned out to be one of the more bizarre opening ceremonies ever staged.
The ceremonies were an oddball lesson in English history with a series of skits on what looked like sets from the Teletubbies. While it all admittedly was very surreal, the attempt to create a Monty Pythonesque vibe of black and whimsical humor fell mostly flat. Whoever came up with these hallucinations must have been smoking some doozy Bubba Kush.
At the start, the Olympic stadium appeared as a pastoral English countryside – the “green and pleasant land” – with maypoles, peasants, live farm animals, cricket players and fake, fluffy clouds. Soon, a giant tree on a green hill was mysteriously uprooted and then rose into the sky. Out of the hole it left behind, hundreds of coal miners and factory workers started to emerge, apparently “ushering in the Industrial Revolution” as Matt Lauer helpfully explained on NBC.
The NBC commentators, as usual, provided endless Olympic trivia with the same stilted and inane verbosity as is usually reserved for the floats at the Rose Bowl parade. Surely, NBC also butchered the tape-delayed event to forcefully accommodate commercial breaks and pieced together portions of the ceremonies in ways that must have only amplified the already preposterous absurdities.
Those industrial revolutionaries then proceeded to dismantle the first set which eventually was replaced by smokestacks rising out of the ground and blacksmiths forging enormous Olympic rings. At some point, a Queen double parachuted into the diorama from a hovering helicopter, accompanied by James Bond. Children in pajamas serenaded her with “God save the Queen.” Up in the stadium suite reserved for dignitaries, the Queen herself carried a dour expression. Evidently, she was not saved from this weird tribute to the National Health Services that had all the grace of an homage to a children’s epidemic.
Later, Mr. Bean made faces and an attempt at musical comedy, and then hordes of Mary Poppinses suspended the rest of my belief. I gave up for good after the Chariots of Fire thing.
This show never came even close to the beautiful opening and closing ceremonies at the Albertville Winter Olympics in 1992. Those had all the poetry and playfulness of a Cirque de Soleil performance.
This one – not so much.
