Tokyo may be deferred for a while, but London’s Olympic Games are returning to your screens.
Nothing unites the country quite like the Olympics. Nothing except a pandemic, that is… So to invite you to look back on happier times of national pride and sporting triumph, Team GB will be broadcasting the opening ceremony for London’s 2012 Olympic Games in its entirety today, kicking off at 4pm on their Facebook page. (Featured image: @teamgb)
Whilst we’ve recently become champions of the long-distance jump from the sofa to the fridge and the 200-metre sprint to Tesco, the broadcast will let you muse on a time when all we needed to worry about was mastering the Mobot. Plus, you’ll get to see James Bond and the Queen doing that skydiving stunt again, which is pretty cool.
The opening ceremony, which was widely regarded as a roaring success, featured scenes from the UK’s past, from rural beginnings to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Danny Boyle’s meticulously-planned show somehow encompassed Shakespeare passages, a minute’s silence for the soldiers of Britain’s wars, a tribute to the NHS (extremely poignant now), the arrival of the Empire Windrush, the women’s suffrage movement, and the invention of the World Wide Web. And now, you can see it in all its glory once more.
Is it enough to compensate for the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics? No, but it’s a little reminder of one of London’s greatest moments, and a competition that unites the entire world – and right now, I think both of those are exactly what we need.