NIGHTMARE. Another programme with the word "dream" in the title. Don't those London folk realise yet that while they may well dream of the 2012 Olympic Games coming to their city, vast swathes of the kingdom feel less than enthusiastic? And are they
going to inflict their vacuous optimism on the rest of us for the next three and a bit years?
Such, at least, was the initial reaction to noticing this three-parter in the schedules, although by the time the opener had ended and the trailer for next week's episode had been shown, some of that scepticism-cum-cynicism had gone. Part two, we discovered, recognises that the preparations for the Games are not an untramelled delight for everyone, and that some people in the east of London, where most of the building work is going on, have already had their lives badly disrupted.
So there will be shades of grey there. Wednesday's opening part, on the other hand, was a simpler affair, which could easily have worked as a standalone show: rather than dealing with all the issues surrounding the London Games, it simply documented the creation and staging of the eight-minute handover performance which was part of the closing ceremony in Beijing last August.
That was the one with the red London bus, hundreds of dancers, Leona Lewis, Jimmy Page and David Beckham. The one with Chris Hoy, in a suit, on a bike. The one that got a panning from some snooty London-based critics but was generally well received in the country at large.
Two men were responsible for ensuring the show ran smoothly, and they emerged as the central characters in this hour-long documentary. Martin was the tall, thin, fair-haired one who has the grandiose title of Head of Ceremonies; Stephen was the short, chubby, dark-haired one in charge of the "creative team" for the London slot.
"I want to tell a contemporary story of where we are now," Martin explained. In this story there was apparently no room for one of Stephen's early ideas, which had the Queen (presumably not the real one, though you never know with those creative types) pushing a hostess trolley up the running track in the Bird's Nest stadium. Or did that bit survive and it was just me who missed it?
Nor was there any room for some parts of the National Anthem. With the kind permission of Buckingham Palace, the lyrics were rearranged, and suddenly they contained a lot of guff about international fraternity as well as all that uplifting stuff which expresses the hope that our octogenarian monarch still has a few decades left in her yet.
By the time the team got to Beijing and started rehearsing, they should have been down to some fine-tuning. Instead, they became immersed in political negotiations with squadrons of Beijing bureaucrats.
As the problems worsened – with four days to go, for instance, the Chinese had still not even given permission for the cast and bus actually to enter the stadium and perform – it became clear that Martin's main role was to keep everyone as calm as possible. It was probably Stephen's job, too, but he did not do it so well, reacting particularly badly, for example, when learning that the dancers would have to perform not on a light, springy, wooden surface as they had at first been told, but on carpet.
This, he decided, would make the set look like "the bedroom of a heroin addict". Alas, drastic editing prevented us from learning if he thought that only heroin addicts have carpets in their bedrooms, or that their taste in flooring was particularly vile.
The problems remained on the day of the show itself. No-one would be allowed into the stadium to perform, the local administrators had told them, unless they had a little yellow sticker on their accreditation cards. And there were only five stickers left.
Unperturbed, Martin sent everyone off to the Bird's Nest an hour early, supposedly with the instructions that "We're just going to barge our way in." The solution was probably more diplomatic than that, but drastic editing etc...
Anyway, after all those difficulties, the show went off smoothly. Lewis sang, Page played, Beckham booted a ball into the middle distance, and Stephen and Martin had turned their own eight-minute dream, yes, that word again, into reality.
