A real Loch mess
“WELCOME to Scotland!” bawled John Barrowman, who left it, aged eight, to move to Illinois.
And what a welcome it wasn’t. It looked like a half-empty village hall at the end of a cheap wedding where the bride is slumped in a corner, crying.
The Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony was always going to suffer from comparisons to the Olympic Games, which had purpose-built stadia, a bigger budget and James Bond at its disposal.
So it would be harsh to criticise it for having fewer fireworks, and absence of flying beds, or not enough parachuting monarchs. There was simply no way to top that. But oh, it could have been so much better!
Scotland is a land of rugged beauty, lyrical language, poetry, rebellion, whisky, mirth. What did we get? An American pretending to be a Scot, riding around on top of a 4x4 amid a mal-coordinated folk dance whose high point was a man without his trousers on.
Whoever choreographed this television miscarriage needs to be stapled to Hadrian’s Wall. They took something that could have been great and by dint of great effort made it as rubbish as they could. What were they thinking? “Scotland. Right. Let’s have some Scottish dancing! But rather than a super-impressive 200 synchronised ankle-flickers let’s just stick half a dozen on some barrels.
“They invented t he telephone? Let’s making passing reference to it in the world’s worst-ever song that my f our- year- old son knocked up on his Casio.
“And we’ve got to get the Loch Ness Monster in somehow, it’s the only thing Americans will understand. Um. How about a massive purple draught excluder? That’ll do.”
Chuck in Barrowman crowd surfing a purple velvet curtain while singing about heather and SuBo singing Paul McCartney’s least popular song and hey, you’ve got a hit. It’s no wonder poor Huw Edwards was reduced to using the word “eccentric” so often. All it would have taken was a little imagination and it could have been so much better. More dancing volunteers to fill the floor and not make it look like a minor lynching was under way.
Some truly Scottish heroes – surely Andy Murray wouldn’t refuse? At one point they had a Proclaimers song sung by someone OTHER than the Proclaimers. And for the love of all that’s holy, there’s no point having two people farting about on their own in a massive shed. Give them a backdrop, or some props, or at least a blasted spotlight.
I ended up feeling sorry for Scotland that a great nation had employed such a bunch of halfwits that it was being represented to the world with all the glory due to a small county in the East Midlands. As Huw said at the start: “We’ve got an opportunity to say something to the world.” They could have said: “ROARRR!” Instead it was a whimpering mess.
DIRECTING live TV coverage of a major event like the opening ceremony is a real headache and BBC1 did a grand job. But I don’t know why the BBC News Channel also had to cut to it repeatedly through the night – if viewers wanted to see it, they could surely switch over. Weren’t they watching a news channel because they wanted some news?