God Save Your Mad Parade – Danny Boyle’s “Isle of Wonders”

Having initially been sceptical about the Olympics and the opening ceremony, it turned out that Danny Boyle’s Isle of Wonder was well worth a watch. Faced with the monumental task of following Beijing’s opening ceremony 4 years ago, with a fraction of the funding at his disposal, Boyle really nailed it.

It’s often difficult to culturally define the English. The French identify themselves, or rather we identify them, as bicycle riding, beret wearing, baguette eaters, the Australians have boomerangs and kangaroos, the Scottish have bagpipes and kilts, and the Spanish have sombreros and a disgusting lack of bovine animal rights, but the English don’t seem to culturally offer much. However, Danny Boyle managed to portray British culture in the opening ceremony as possibly the most important on the planet. No, we don’t have much in terms of nation bound oddities, but that is because the British culture is that good that it has been exported and is now the culture of the world. Railways, cars, television, electric light, turbine powered ships, jet propelled aeroplanes, are all British inventions and culture which were too good to remain solely within our shores. Boyle touched on this with his scene depicting the industrial revolution, and one should remember while we were steaming in to the 20^th century, the majority of the world was still stuck in the dark ages.

Even up to the modern day, British ingenuity and culture is being lent to the world. The title of “Father of the Computer” is given to Englishman Charles Babbage, while the first electronic computer was designed and constructed at Bletchley Park by the British, and in particular Alan Turing, whose death would later go on to inspire the computer brand Apple. So although it appears as though the likes of the Japanese are superior in the technology department, their smart phones and Tamagotchis pale into insignificance when compared to the war winning, Nazi code-breaking computers of Bletchley Park, which paved  the way for a global technological culture. Impressively, Danny Boyle managed to pay tribute to Britain’s contribution to the technological world, with a small section of the ceremony involving Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of one of the most important inventions of all time, the World Wide Web. As Berners-Lee sat typing on his keyboard, words were beamed on to the crowd reading “This is for everyone”, recognising the fact that the internet wasn’t patented, but given as a gift to mankind, something that belonged to and helped everybody, just as the British refused to patent penicillin once we’d discovered it, although the Americans weren’t quite so altruistic, quickly slapping intellectual property rights on it and charging us to use our own discovery, which was good of them.

Boyle’s ceremony also paid tribute to other important parts of our culture, touching on the fact that the majority of world sports were either created or codified in Britain. Whereas the likes of cricket and rugby are usually associated with England, sports such as football, tennis, athletics, cycling, boat racing, golf, table tennis, badminton, and an almost endless list of other sports, are rarely thought about as exclusively British culture, yet that would have been the case before they were exported to the rest of the world.

The second half of the ceremony paid tribute to British music and the influence it has on the world. Since the times of the Beatles and Stones, Britannia has ruled the airwaves, pioneering new sounds, smashing old musical regimes, and spawning new rhythmical dynasties. It seems somewhat ironic that The Clash, The Jam, and The Sex Pistols should be put forward as a representation of British culture, when 30 years ago they were despised with such venom by the British mainstream, however, it’s a testament to how they have helped shape the British mind set. When a band like the Sex Pistols, who in the 70s rebelled against the status quo of British culture to such an extent that when “God Save the Queen” reached number 1 during the diamond jubilee the public were bizarrely informed that there was no number 1 that week, have two of their records played during a ceremony representing British culture, it really shows how these bands were at the forefront of free thinking. While Punk was blowing away the stale, self-indulgent dinosaur that popular music had become, paving the way for New Wave and the birth of modern pop, it was also blowing away the archaic state of mind of the British public, paving the way for more liberal thinking. Reshaping our nation’s, and often the world’s, attitude has often been a defining feature of British music. Even in the 60s, bands like The Kinks were light years ahead of politicians and world statesmen on issues such as gender classification and sexual orientation, and one of the reasons why British music deserved its place in the Olympic opening ceremony.

What was really impressive about the Isle of Wonders was its attempt to convey the message inclusiveness. Fair play and equal rights for all are often touted as being the backbone of the Olympics, and these concepts have regularly been fought for on our soil, and were acknowledged in the ceremony, represented by the Jarrow marchers, the Union movement, and the much underappreciated NHS. The appreciation for these institutes comes at a time when they see themselves under constant attack. The current government seems determined to dismantle the NHS under the guise of reforms, prattling on about the wastefulness of what is probably the most efficient healthcare service in the world. A service that provides care for anyone and everyone that needs it, whether you’re rich, poor, black, white, male or female, if you need help, the NHS offers out its hand. Despised by the Tories, and strangely enough by many Americans, brainwashed by generations of fundamentalist politicians that prefer to let their own people die of sickness in the street than succumb to a “dirty damn socialist” national health system, the NHS is truly something to be proud of.  It was also good to see the ceremony include the trade union movement, a notion that fights against repression and for rights and equality for all, values held highly in the Olympics. However, despite Britain having some of the worst trade union laws in Europe, the government is still attempting to crush the voice of the people, playing private sector off against public, when they should be united, and even pondering sacking striking workers, effectively stating that they’ll cut your wage, cut your pension, cut your jobs and services, but don’t complain.

Marching along with the Jarrow Crusade and the Unionists, were the suffragettes, yet another tribute to equality and inclusiveness, but also significant in that London 2012 is the first ever Olympics where women are able to compete in  all the events that the men compete in. However, not everyone buys in to this idea of the Games. Tory MP Aiden Burley, vented his frustrations, labelling the opening ceremony as “leftie multi-cultural crap”, apparently taken by surprise that the Olympics, which includes over 200 countries, would have black people in it. He’d obviously been hoping that Boyle would have included more of Britain’s capitalist history, with perhaps a tribute to the money making machine of the slave trade. However, unfortunately for Burley, Boyle could have easily developed this scene to show how that the people of Britain campaigned against the slave trade, and eventually forced our country to become one of the first to abolish it, and then force others to follow suit.

The Olympics often has the power to install patriotism, and you may find yourself viewing things through English rose-tinted glasses, but one can’t help but feel that Danny Boyle has done our nation’s proud history justice. There were initial fears that the Olympic ideals would be sacrificed in the name of money and greed, but through the opening ceremony, Boyle has managed to build a green and pleasant image of Britain, amongst the dark satanic mills of corporate interest.