None of the twenty-seven million British people who watched this celebration of British history and culture could deny it had some very moving moments. Two of these for example would be the celebration of our unique National Health Service and the fine idea of allowing British sporting youngsters to light the Olympic flame. These things show the world aspects of a nation’s generous spirit. Most of the rest, despite all the choreographed sparkle, music and dancing, was a rotten representation of British history and life.
You may not like such a comment after all the dancing and lights, but let us look at how things actually were. The rural idyll! Girls in pretty dresses with flower baskets… kids dancing around the maypole… all against Nimrod Variations background music by Elgar and touches of Jerusalem, like all the sheep, the green grass and country cottages had some deep spiritual meaning like Glastonbury Tor which is just a hill with a tower on it. Part of the made up fantasy to help promote the sale of crystals in the nearby town!
So what cultural epoch of British history was this supposed to represent to the world, Danny Boy? Was it the time of the Norman Conquest and the 400 hundred years of brutal feudalism and peasant subjugation to rural lords? If that was the case why no mention of the great Peasant Revolt of 1381? Okay, so after the girls and the grass came the chimneys and workers of the Industrial Revolution, kicking off from around 1750. So what happened to the great Reformation of the Church by Henry VIII followed by the magnificent Elizabethan Age? And where was the defeat of the Spanish Armada by Francis Drake and the English Navy, and of course, where was the greatest genius of the time, William Shakespeare?
What happened to all that Danny Boy? What happened to the great political Revolution of Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War of the 17th century. Was the chopping off of a king’s head a bit too embarrassing for you in view of present Royal company whose arse you seemed to be only too happy to kiss with your child’s choir rendition of two full verses of the National Anthem? A little number that’s certainly no anthem to a nation!
So, smoking chimney stacks, women cranking wheels, men with beards wearing top hats and looking benevolent to represent the factory owners along with a bit of Brunel. And all the symbols of industry set against endless loud pop music with the men in top hats jigging around in strange postures and doing funny things with their hands! Then a bit of the Suffragette Movement and remembrance of two World Wars symbolised by men dressed as soldiers whistling music when the organisers could have shown life in the trenches or men being machine gunned on barbed wire or a scene or two of the London Blitz. But no, don’t offend the Germans!
But then don’t offend the Tory representatives of the new industrial society, so nothing about the Trades Union Movement, the first of its kind in the world and a great example of our history. Nothing about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Nothing about the condition of workers in factories and the long brutal hours down the coal mines. And nothing about the living conditions of working people in the new towns and cities.
The social conditions of British working people ignored, but now a jump as if by magic to West Indian immigration of the 1950s and parades of people from these islands but amazingly nothing of the British Abolition of the Slave Trade nor the Irish or Jewish Immigration in the mid-19th and early 20th century but lots of London’s Pearly Kings and Queens instead with a BBC commentary that bordered on the ludicrous! A silly patronising verbiage of condescending rubbish that only this prime state broadcasting channel can do in such a jolly hockey sticks manner. But now what’s this? A switch to the sixties, James Bond magically appears at Buckingham Palace, meets Queen and Corgis then flies over the sights of London to the sound of RAF Dambusters music before arriving at the Olympic Stadium with the Goldfinger theme blasting everyone’s ears. Now what made you think James Bond and fucking Goldfinger were lead examples of modern British culture Danny Boy instead of what they really were, prime commercial box office crap.
There is a distinction you know. Or did you? But then what a splendidly silly advert for our secret service to the world, but never mind, Queen and consort arrive with the President of the Olympic Committee and with the bearded hippie look-alike, the archbishop of Canterbury behind her to make it look holy, she opens the Games with a little speech. Now the Union flag arrives, carried by men heavy with medals and is run up a flagpole as a choir of kids sing God save the Queen. The crowd cheer, she looks very appreciative as so she should, and the Pageant continues on with a montage the National Health Service represented by Great Ormond Street Hospital to showcase this great achievement, to the world.
Now this was something but it was all held in place by ridiculous dancing nurses and jiving doctors all rocking in time to swinging jazz music. Is that what it’s like in hospital words and corridors these days? I certainly don’t think so or the Tories would have a ready-made excuse to close the whole lot down. There may have been lots of children in hospital beds and others all happy and dancing but where was the British discoverer of Penicillin, Alexander Fleming, or the father of medical hygiene Joseph Lister?
And where, Danny Boy, was the great cultural contribution of modern British science to the world? Where was Michael Faraday, father of applied electrical experiment, and where was the founder of modern biology Charles Darwin? Well if you forgot about Darwin how about the inventor of the lathe which made modern engineering possible, Henry Maudslay? Okay none of these but you wanted culture so we got Children’s Literature and of course Harry Potter and JK Rowling! But then how about our great British poets, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley and Tennyson, or our great writers, read and admired everywhere, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells father of modern sci-fi, and George Orwell. No, instead we got Harry Potter! Some literary nerd in a society of nerds where literature only equates to commercial success whereas the others, all giants in their own right, don’t.
Literature disposed of, the Pageant moved to a meaningless dialogue between pop character conductor Simon Rattle and Rowan Atkinson. And what cultural pinnacle of British achievement was that supposed to represent, Danny Boy? Was Mr Bean more important than our great pioneering artists, Turner, Constable and Blake? Was Mr Bean more important than our great composers like Holst and Elgar? Music! Did someone say music? After a brief, semi-pathetic portrayal of the arrival of the digital age into British life there was at least a well-deserved tribute to Tim Berners Lee, father of the Internet. That was a fair thing but to follow it up with a series of montages of the history of British pop music from the Stones and Beatles to punk rock and rap with endless happy faced men and women, boys and girls dancing to well-known pop songs WAS SUPPOSED TO CONVEY WHAT, PRECISELY? That we gave pop music to the world and how important it is to the British economy? Well firstly we didn’t, but then who’s kidding who here? Was this more important than Charles Darwin, Dickens or William Shakespeare when evaluating Britain’s cultural contribution to the world? Only if you’re thinking of money. How very David Cameron of you Danny Boy!
Teenagers endlessly dancing! Well you know teenagers Danny. They spend all their time dancing! Is that because so many are unemployed or so happy working in rotten jobs for rotten wages? Is it because affording a higher education is impossible for most unless their parents are rich? Are they all dancing because so many are deprived and depressed that they riot or get drunk or get a lengthy prison sentence for stealing a bottle of water?
Pop music in spades, like it’s the chief cultural contribution of modern Britain to the world. Well here’s a few more British cultural contributions in our recent history you could have mentioned. How about our cheating, lying British bankers and rotten financial system in the City of London? Surely they showed the world how to cook up interest rate deals or sell people insurance schemes they didn’t need. Or how about our MPs swindling the taxpayer with their expense claims? Best of all would have been to show Oliver Cromwell once beating them all out of the House of Commons with a stick because he knew they were all crooks. Indeed, it was our great English Revolution that once showed the world how to get rid of Kings and the French soon followed!
Why no mention of that in your cultural pageant? Whoops, I forgot that your mates Lord Coe and the Queen were there and we couldn’t have any of the grim realities of English history played out in front of them. Never mind, after all the countless opportunities you missed or turned your back on to show the great historical contribution of British culture to the world you finally went all religious. Maybe it’s because you lacked the imagination or had nowhere else to go that you introduced the entry of the Olympic Torch into the Stadium and the lighting of the beacon with a singularly British religious down in the mouth dirge, Abide With Me, a wretched piece of pathos particularly aimed at the working class and perfectly in tune with their enforced tribulations.
Okay, a hymn to end your cultural pageant. Lots of shouting, dancing and symbolism but no real substance. Symbolism without continuity and lacking in depth. Britain gave the world far more than the crap in your pageant and you had the chance to encapsulate all that genius and energy and strut it but you weren’t up to it and chickened out. Forget the rat-arsed Tory MPs who said your presentation was lefty. Britain’s true cultural greatness had so much more to it historically and you muffed the chance to show it.
And after your pageant came the parade of athletes and their at times colourful entry, all accompanied with the fatuous commentary of BBC presenters Huw Edwards and Hazel Irvine. Much of it plain ghastly in its sheer awfulness but what a treat it was to see each team supported by the political leaders of their country along with their wives, most of them looking like the well fed gangsters they actually are. Each flag leading its nation till its team passed and then stuck in the rural muck heap of Glastonbury Tor. Now just how symbolic was that?
Finally the big London Olympics of 2012 cultural give-away in the speech of Lord Coe, Olympian gold medallist and former great athlete but now jogging jonny to the British Establishment. His placing of royalty status above all things, above that of the athletes for whom the Games are for with the words, “Your majesty, your majesties, your royal highnesses,” says it all. The athletes of these games perform on behalf of unelected feudal monarchs. They are at the end of the line, monarchs at the beginning! Ancient Greece was a slave owning society. Women never had the vote their but the men who did were free men. Not so where a monarch rules. People are subjects, not free citizens.
Thank you Lord Coe for describing London as a thriving commercial centre but with its banks fraudulently fixing interest rates and acting as laundering holes for drugs money, that is apart from swindling customers , I’d have thought that any serious Russian Oligarch or gangster would have preferred stuffing it in Switzerland! They’re far better at hiding things in Zurich than London.
And finally this… Most British people who’ve lived and died in the last thousand years had to work incredibly hard to achieve the few rights and freedoms they’ve got and have created the wonderful cultural legacy they have. The creation of the National Health Service came after a tremendous struggle by working men and women for a cleaner, healthier life as was given to them by a Welshman who’d spent much of his early life down a coal mine. The social welfare benefits they’ve gained, from pensions to unemployment protection, came after a struggle by British working people for a better more secure life after the depredations of poverty they’d suffered throughout the 19th century. These human rights are cultural milestones for the world and its working people to see, not for the rich or the political elites who want to take it away. They are a British example of what can be achieved by courage.
Likewise the achievements of British Art, Science, Engineering and Education. It was the humble people who led the way in so many things and then not least our feudal aristocracy in their own quest for political rights and a Magna Carta. Rights that spread in time from high to low and became a beacon for the world. Our great men and women didn’t dance their way to excellence and social justice. They worked for it and like our modern Olympic athletes taught themselves to be excellent. I guess that was the special something they showed to the world.
To minimise all the great examples Britain gave to the world or to ignore them, like Shakespeare and Darwin, the Peasants Revolt, the struggle of working people to organise themselves, to pass over our great political English Civil War with all its achievements, to ignore the sufferings of the poor of Scotland and the hell of the Highland Clearances and replace these with a national anthem to royalty, with dancing teenagers, pop music and cavorting national health service staff is an insult to all those who lived and died to create the greatness of Britain’s cultural heritage.
Brilliant, controversial but brilliant.
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