WHAT A LOAD OF ROT 'N' BOVVER

Praise the Lord of the Rings that the LONDON LYMPICS is over, gone and hopefully we will forget all about. But as this rag doesn’t ever let anything die peacefully we thought maybe a few comments about the Opening Ceremony would be appropriate. Never mind the games it’s the opening that matters.

Here I was thinking that Maxine’s Funeral was one of the most elaborate and pointless exercise ever conceived.

We can pass quickly over the fact that the cost of putting on the show is born 10% by the Sponsors who make a profit and 90% by the Taxpayer who will most likely end up still paying for it ten years down the line. Sydney, despite all the hype and hoopla is still saddled with a under-utilised sports complex (the Royal Easter Show is its principal attraction)and still counting the real cost and Athens helped throw Greece into the chaos of today. We will never know how Bejing fared because of the paranoid secrecy of that one party state pretending to be Communist but we do know there is a huge complex of weed-infested concrete structures where the games used to be. Tourism never has and never will recover the cost despite all that is said and done. They might boast billions in revenue but that isn’t profit is it? What about the interest on loans and the ongoing maintenance?

Lets face it the Lympics are no longer a sporting event but a corporate money making publicity machine organised by the O.I.C which could only be described as a bunch of geriatric executives who have lied, cheated, bull-shitted and conned their way to the top and some of them are not even competent enough to have a quiet root. Not even the athletes are really representative of their country (at least for the Western World) as they usually hail from upper-middle class families who can afford the time and money including all the overseas trips to watch little Jack or Jill ski down the hill.

Did anyone watch the bloody thing anyway. It might just be my social circle or should I say line of stools along the bar in Linton but I have yet to speak to anyone who saw it. It’s lucky I recorded the event as I spent most of the time rolling on the floor with uncontrollable giggles and had to keep rewinding to ensure I was not having those strange visions again.

For those who did not dare watch it and suffered yet again through re-runs of Hogan’s Heroes I will attempt to (seriously) describe the scene as it splattered across the front of my T.V.

The London Lympics Opening was in a nutshell an attempt to recreate the unleashing of the Industrial Revolution and the potential of chaos and poverty. From Georgian country splendour with Maypoles and Shepherds to a Victorian plunder-party ripping the earth apart and being pillaged by filthy-folk with shovels and picks spewing forth from a mine shaft like a volcano erupting.

To be fair, which is hard for me, at least the Arena was filled with a sea of multi-coloured Britains. All the faces and colours of the world which is what the Lympics is supposed to be and not the sea of yellow on a field of red that was Bejing.

I did notice that about 500 ticket-holders were given stranding room only on the field itself presumably having given up their seats to the children’s choir in coloured T-shirts.

After the initial explosion of the new civilization we heard the words of Kingdom Brunel who used more bricks, mortar, timber and steel than B.H.P-Billiton paving over Britain with progress. He celebrated the golden past to a sea of exploited workers milling around between four huge phallic chimneys spewing pollution into the atmosphere. Sydney was the green games and what I saw here was a coal dust spectacular. Sydney had clothes hoists, mowers and shearers clipping cardboard boxes, London was a display of a past era that had profited from a lucrative slave trade and Queen Vic who was the worlds biggest drug dealer.

It was mentioned that the two most popular historical figures in Britain were Winston Churchill #1 and Kingdom Brunel #2. The first spent the war years in a drunken haze and the other was the first version of Alan Bond. Where were William Shakespeare and Margaret Thatcher in this gigantic celebration of mutual masturbation.

The athletic field was alternatively filled with groups of rambling Abraham Lincolns, the Beatles and Multi-cultured migrants that make up the central theme of ‘Old Blighty’. Even Chelsea Pensioners and a bloody big group of Cockny Pearly’s braved the grime and steel mills replicas that surrounded them and appearing to have a right old knees up. But they were forced to do that to get around all the shit that was falling down around them.

In just the first quarter of the event we had been transported from the Britain of green and pleasant lands through its profitable exploitative era and on, hopefully, into some sort of decadent future. Her industrial might was symbolized by a rain of fire and presumably brimstone falling onto the participants below like a scene from Dante’s Inferno or maybe a homage to the Lord of the Rings. About the time that I realised hundreds of drummers were trying to bash holes into the bottom of buckets I thought I might see some blokes with four-cornered hankies tied to their scones and pants rolled up to their knees to wander on with a load deck-chairs, but what we got was a mass of beds, nurses and children representing, god-forbid, the National Health Service. Supposedly a representation of Mary Poppins the nurses pranced, the children jumped up and down on the mattresses and being bothered by black-shaped monsters prancing around like paedophiles ready to carry the children off to their ‘special wonderland’.

Between scene changes we were entertained by old has-beens and even older movies. And that was the cue for James Bond to collect the Queen from Buck House and helicopter her to the Lympic Stadium. As they strode the hall I couldn’t help but think that Odd Job might appear from nowhere and take the heads off a couple of right royal statues.

As they flew past Big Ben a gigantic licorice Churchill doffed his homberg and bowed in recognition. It’s a pity he didn’t recognise the blunder of Gallipoli. Then, Oh! God, then, I couldn’t believe my eyes when 007 threw Her Majesty out of the helicopter. Robert Mugabeand a host of other ex-Colonial rebels could be here cheering at this point. By now I had to rewind several times lest my eyes deceived me yet again. I have to admit that the Brits are the best in the world at comedy and this was the biggest and best performance I have seen since ‘The Plank’ and the only comic genius not on the field was John Cleese.

In his stead we got Rowan Atkinson and a little band conducted by Simon Rattle. Even though it was an homage to Jacques Violleret as the pissed-off drummer in Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ he managed to make it uniquely Mr. Bean and even the great Simon got a bit rattled at the end.

What we heard next was the never-ending Tubular Bells of Mike Oldfield and they tingled and dingled and donged on and on for mind-numbing hours. Another annoying aspect of the Lympics is if they can drop certain games and sports why they can’t drop this Francophile rubbish? Why do they have to abuse our ears with French as well as English. Why cannot the games be spoken only in the language of the Host Nation and let the world, which most do now anyway, televise, translate and commentate in their own native tongues to their own audiences. Even now we still have to put up with this charade between the French and the British and ask the world to make the language of diplomacy Chinese, it soon will be anyway or maybe to be accurate and true then everything should be spoken in ancient Greek as some spectators don't understand either language anyway.

Finally on the field modern Britain came to the surface with a thousand dancers and lengths of irradiated spaghetti. Modern technology has invaded the games and I worry that we will never again see parades of Sheep, Cattle, Dogs and a lot of Bull.

As we began to come closer to the proper business at hand, that of packing the stadium with as many athletes as possible, as with telephone boxes or volkswagons, we begin to see the modern era emerging from the coal-dust still permeating the air of the stadium.

This has been a long slog to read, I know, but then the Opening was a long slog to sit through too. You’re unlucky if you missed the greatest laugh ever so I thought I’d just bring you the highlights.

A tribute to British music inspired hordes of dancing lampshades to wheel around the arena and speaking of wheels I noticed a token wheelchair dancer doing her thing and typically ignored by those around her. While we are on the subject of wheels wheels out rolled a parade of tired old geriatric pop and rock stars to represent British Exports and who still believe that Britains greatest exports were David Beckham and the Spice Girls. Even Malcolm Mc.Laren’s Mock Group ‘Sex Pistols’ were evident but I did note that they refrained from playing their special version of God Save The Queen. They apparently represented gullible Britain.

Lo and behold an inexplicable parade of black spermatozoa invaded the ground bouncing up and down like African Masai Warriors. I think they were meant to represent a very licentious and profitable Slave Trading Britain. Then they try to give us technology savvy Britain by displaying Sir Tim Berners-Lee as the inventor of the World Wide Web and we really know that it was Clinton’s Vice-president Al Gore that really lay claim to that. But maybe it was Global Warming?

Two or three times the commentators mentioned the heat wave they were experiencing probably caused by all the hot air surrounding the Lympics but they neglected to say whether that it was Fahrenheit or Centrigrade.

Lo and behold if it can’t get even more confusing they have a lengthy memorial to those who bought tickets but died before they could take their seats, This might explain the poor attendance at some events. They had all kicked that same bucket being bashed about earlier. When the world is in a celebratory mood, at least within a kilometer of this event, an event more appropriate to a closing ceremony puts a damper on the celebrations. Was this another skit where I couldn’t get the point?

But we did get to the point in the end and I will be as brief as possible because this parade of nations was as boring as all shit. First in of course were the Greeks. Was this to be held in order of Debtor Nations where the most broke come first out of the starting gate like a handicapping system? It could explain why Zimbabwe came at the end as they don’t owe anything due to the fact that nobody will lend them anything in the first place.

When Australia ‘strolled’ past we were greeted by the comment that we were the strongest and greatest nation in the Lympic Games. OK we have been at every one of them but with 449 medals in total we are a long way behind the 2,449 of the United States. Maybe he should have said pound for pound we were the best.

Patriotic clichés kept in the cupboard for four years waiting for a decent government were rolled out to be thrown around like ‘gold, gold….gold for Australia’. Well whoopee doo. Hundreds of millions spent for a lump of cheap gold plating sponsored by Rio Tinto. For what we have spent on this increasingly corporate charade we could have given every Ozzie a gold medal and cried ‘Oye! Oye! Oye! instead.

Her Majesty appeared serene, even bored by all this, she certainly was not amused and looked more like she was missing her crochet needles most of the time.

Speeches were given but not from the light on the hill but from a podium at the bottom of it. A good use I thought for the unfinished bit of arena covered up with realistic enough grass. There was a lot of security around this ‘grassy knoll’.

The Lympic flag bearing was a moving sight but not what appeared to be an embalmed Mohammed Ali being jossled forward to touch the flag. Why can’t they let this great man sink away in dignity and it is beyond my comprehension as to why he was even there to do it. Maybe some nation should immortalize him as a Lympic Torch with flames coming out of his noggin. He looked less life-like than Wilma.

At the end we had visions of that giant bell, which was only rung once I think. But I realised that like the J.Arthur Rank Gong it was but a fake prop and an appropriate sound effect. It tolled me everything I needed to know. That the whole Lympic movement has turned into a fake prop for corporate gred and gullible governments. The news that Melbourne might bid again makes me shudder at the thought. We survived Melbourne in 56 and Sydney in 2000 but the way things are going with costs for the games I doubt that we should offer to bankrupt our nation for the sake of a cheap hamburger and a sugary drink.