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发帖数: 3620 | 1 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewgilligan/100173083/olym
The opening ceremony was a bit of a grab-bag, wasn’t it? I thought some of
it was great, some was rather bad and quite a lot of it will mystify the
foreign TV viewers (95% of the audience) who it was supposed to dazzle.
Things I liked: Thomas Heatherwick’s Olympic cauldron, a brilliantly
imaginative reworking of the old flame. The Queen allegedly parachuting from
a helicopter. The Mr Bean turn in the Chariots of Fire sequence – nicely
self-mocking and also very translatable. The forging and coming together of
the Olympic rings.
Some of the rest was bitty and disjointed; the sub-mobile-phone advert style
of the digital section was particularly weak. It was more political than I
expected. Voldemort loomed over the NHS. Tonight marked perhaps its final
transformation from a healthcare system into a religion. Dancers made up the
CND symbol. The Royal Family looked bored, but the new Right-On Royal
Family – Doreen Lawrence and Shami Chakrabarti – got to carry the Olympic
flag.
The NHS segment in particular underlined how surprisingly parochial this
ceremony was. The idea of the Health Service as a beacon for the world is,
bluntly, a national self-delusion. Most other Western European countries
have better state healthcare systems – and healthier people – than we do.
Does the average Chinese person even know what the letters stand for?
But I suppose the whole Olympics is in a broader sense parochial. Three
weeks ago, I was in Libya witnessing that country’s first free election in
sixty years: an end, or at least a beginning of the end, to decades of
madness and tyranny which killed tens of thousands and blighted the lives of
millions. To borrow the words of tonight’s over-excited TV commentators,
that really was an inspirational and historic moment. Tonight, by contrast,
was just a show. |
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