Danny Boyle’s extravaganza burnished what was best about the UK, but the myth it forged has been crumbling ever since
It still makes me cry. Especially, perhaps, the very first moments, before it really began, when skeins of filmy blue fabric rippled across the excited crowd to the sound of Nimrod from the Enigma Variations – Elgar at his truest, most melancholic self. Looking back on it now, it really was the music of the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, 10 years ago today, that was at the heart of Danny Boyle’s brilliant and bonkers production. It wound all the way round from Handel to Hey Jude, via David Bowie and Dizzee Rascal. There was a boy soprano singing Jerusalem. There were the Sex Pistols. It was vaunting, ecstatic, angry, cheeky and reflective by turn, setting the tone for everything. Incredibly slickly produced, the ceremony felt, at the same time, deliciously anarchic.
I wrote at the time that the ceremony forged a new mythology for Britain. It did: it was a national story that managed to weave together the NHS and the Industrial Revolution, maypoles and Windrush, suffragettes and cricket, Fawlty Towers and Blake, The Tempest and punk. It was (to me) thankfully low on military glory, but it did not fail to include the Red Arrows and Winston Churchill: his statue in Parliament Square was seen to wave his cane at Daniel Craig’s James Bond and the Queen as they apparently helicoptered from Buckingham Palace before parachuting into the stadium.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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