by Roger Mosey
The contrast between the Trust and the staff of the BBC was striking. Even three years out, I had been surprised by the large turnout and the warmth of the reception at the headquarters of BBC Scotland at Pacific Quay for our presentation on what the 2012 project was doing. That is always a tough venue for a London-based manager, especially when he is talking about an event that is unavoidably centred on the capital; but in Glasgow, and in Belfast and in Cardiff and right across England, there was a faith in what the BBC could do. This was never uncritical, and I emphasised at every stop that the journalism must be independent. If things went wrong, as they did with the G4S security fiasco, then the BBC must be leading the coverage, and I was pleased in Games-time that BBC London managed to irritate LOCOG considerably with their reporting on empty VIP seats. But colleagues from many different departments wanted to be involved in the Olympic story too: some, like BBC Drama, in a way that we had never expected.
On a sticky afternoon in the summer of 2011, I took the Tube over to LOCOG’s ceremonies team at their home in Three Mills: an unexpected oasis of the creative arts near Bromley-by-Bow station, chosen as an antidote to the tower blocks of Canary Wharf, where most of the Olympics organising team was based. We were going to be shown the plans for the opening ceremony of the Games; an event that had the lowest of expectations in a British gloom-fest about how London 2012 would most likely be truly terrible. Our host was Martin Green, the head of ceremonies, who had chosen Danny Boyle as their creative director. Martin was an example of the strength of the LOCOG team, combining imagination with a shrewd business head.
The first glimpse of what they were planning at Three Mills was not reassuring. There was a scale model of the stadium with a green mound at one end, and the field of play was dotted with plastic models of sheep and cows. A cotton-wool cloud dangled overhead, held in place by a piece of string. But what emerged after that prompted a dramatic swing in my mind from ‘they’ve gone crackers’ to ‘this is creative genius’. The ceremony on that summer’s day a year out was represented by models like the one of the stadium, sketched drawings, pieces of archive film and snatches of music. There were the ‘mood boards’ beloved of advertising agencies: a visual attempt to show what it would be like – the feel, the colour, the atmosphere. The whole thing was stitched together in a presentation that lasted roughly an hour, but what drove through those sixty minutes like an express train was Danny Boyle’s vision. I had argued in a blog in 2009 that the worst outcome for the opening ceremony would be to have it designed by a committee – and this certainly was not. It was one man’s view and what is remarkable is just how much of those 2011 plans were seen by the world twelve months later.
It was an achievement because the ceremony was the most scrutinised aspect of the Olympics, and it was overseen by a whole range of bodies: from the British Cabinet to the IOC, and from the Mayor of London to LOCOG’s panoply of boards. Danny and Martin had to get all of them to agree to it, and there were many times the omens were far from propitious. There were government statements about the need to show just how great a triumph Britain had had in the Second World War. Jeremy Hunt told Andrew Marr a few months ahead of the ceremony that it was vital to show how we had stood alone against fascism, and the people of Lincolnshire lobbied to get a Vulcan bomber flying over the world leaders assembled in peace in Stratford. Much of Britain’s history was strewn with metaphorical landmines, whether it was the risk of offending the nations we had beaten in wars or the countries we had ruled during the age of empire, or even in the relationships within the UK between the English and the Scots, Irish and Welsh.
But Danny sailed through all this. His idea of basing the first part of the ceremony around the Industrial Revolution was inspired: a non-contentious piece of our past, and a beacon for the world. For the second section, honouring the National Health Service, a Conservative-led government – especially a Conservative-led government – could never have vetoed a tribute to the NHS, however bemusing it turned out to be to the rest of the planet. And Danny’s other touches – the suffragettes, the Windrush generation, Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti carrying the Olympic flag – were all defensible in their own right, while making it abundantly clear where his heart lay.
There were some changes, of course, from the 2011 template. One of the most celebrated moments on the night was when the Queen appeared to jump out of a helicopter. When this idea was revealed to Huw Edwards in a planning meeting, before the royal approval had been given, he was certain: ‘She’ll never do it.’ In the storyboard of the film, an additional gag was that the helicopter pilot would be revealed to be Prince William – but that fell foul of the Palace’s aversion to ‘double-teaming’: for special events like these, the Queen’s role is solo.
At that stage, too, Danny simply had ‘a comedy moment’ in his demonstration video, illustrated by old Monty Python clips – and it was this gap that was filled by the Rowan Atkinson Mr Bean sketch. But otherwise the biggest elements were there: from smokestacks crashing out of England’s green and pleasant land and J. K. Rowling reading a bedtime story through to Paul McCartney singing a concluding ‘Hey Jude’. In the recording, it was even in tune.
It would be wrong, though, to imagine this process was easy, and there were indications in the year running up to the ceremony that crockery was sometimes being thrown in the LOCOG kitchen. Danny was never one to dance to the tune of the Olympic sponsors, for instance, and after the Games he described the behaviour of one of them as ‘disgusting’. In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, he said:
The battles were exhausting. My lowest point was the Rapier missiles, which were positioned on buildings near where I live. The Olympics is a festival of peace, for God’s sake. I was very close to walking away. I thought it was morally wrong. I wanted to go out and say, ‘I would prefer to risk being blown up and all 80,000 of us die than have Rapier missiles on top of buildings.’
This sometimes felt like one of a number of plots foreshadowed by the funny and prescient Twenty Twelve comedy on the BBC, though the tension within LOCOG was real and it would have been a disaster if Danny had walked out. But in the BBC Olympic planning team we were most aware of budget problems. Danny had a Hollywood film director’s urge to make it big and bold even if it cost a shedload of money, while LOCOG had an understandable wish to stay within their (still pretty big and bold) budget. In true creative fashion, if he was challenged on budgets Danny would use the ‘shoot and the baby gets it’ technique – which meant it was the things he believed the bosses most wanted that he would threaten to drop if he was at risk of overspending.
That was how BBC Drama ended up making the Queen/James Bond film. It was going to be a startlingly expensive five minutes of television: edging into seven figures. In one of the behind-the-scenes crockery-throwing moments, LOCOG and Danny disagreed on the funding from within the LOCOG budget. It was at risk of being dropped from the running order, and we therefore had a plaintive request put to us: either we made it – and paid for it – or an astonishing moment might be lost to the globe and posterity. As it happened, the BBC Olympic budget was slightly underspent and we could afford it. But a decision to make the film was one that I felt needed to be shared with Mark Thompson. Happily, he took the view that any television producer would take. If you have the chance to make a film featuring the Queen and James Bond, and it will be seen by a few billion people, then it would be mad to turn it down.
We therefore commissioned our Drama colleagues to do the filming to the directions of Danny Boyle, and miraculously – especially for the BBC – almost none of this leaked. At the Buckingham Palace shoot there were 135 crew involved, given the complexity of the operation and the limited availability of the star performers, but only one relatively small and inaccurate story emerged from it. Even when we had a pair of helicopters flying through Tower Bridge, and the Port of London authority unhelpfully told the papers, ‘That’s the BBC filming the Olympic opening ceremony,’ nobody put two and two tog
ether. The film on the night was an electrifying surprise. And in the days ahead of the ceremony I came across Nick Brown from BBC Drama in the cutting room as the final edit was underway, and he said that each time the editing machine disgorged the clip of the actual Queen performing with Daniel Craig he had to pinch himself and ask, ‘Is this real?’
As the Games drew nearer, we spent ever more of our time in Stratford in the International Broadcast Centre. IBCs for sporting events are the same each time: vast aircraft hangars with space carved out for the broadcasters of the world, and a depressing catering operation with queues for bad coffee. The spaces were massive and luxurious for the Americans of NBC, and relatively cramped and functional for the BBC. An inflatable kangaroo showed where the Australians were, and then the smaller nations hung their flags and emblems outside tiny offices shared with others. The miracle of these operations is that the thousands of miles of wiring does what it is supposed to, and the build by the broadcast engineers was flawless.
Our operation spread outside the Olympic Park, too. In a deliberate attempt to separate the up-close BBC Sport operation within each venue from the more objective news coverage, the news presentation location was on the highest floors of a block of council flats overlooking the park. It had a wonderful shot of the Olympic activity in one direction and the London skyline in another, though it was a rough and ready location for the star presenters. There was inadequate air conditioning on baking hot days, fuelled further by studio lighting, and a preparation area that had the ambience of a shower block at a budget camp site. But everybody was thrilled to be there; it was a great assignment, even though for most there were no tickets available for the sport events. Dave Gordon and I moved into a flat in Hackney Wick ready for our 24/7 Games-time roles, prompting jokes from our colleagues about us living together like Morecambe and Wise, only less funny.
In the days immediately before the Games, I felt satisfied that everything was coming together: the robustness of the planning meant the BBC machine was swinging smoothly into action. In the Broadcast Centre, Dave and I had wandered into one of the technical areas and had seen the test cards lined up for our twenty-four feeds of live action: we really were going to launch twenty-four television channels in a few days’ time. Our trails and the splendid title music, commissioned from Elbow, were unmissable across BBC television and radio. There was also the backdrop of the torch relay doing exactly what we had hoped. Massive crowds lined the route all across the United Kingdom, and there were knockout moments: the aerial shots of the relay reaching the summit of Snowdon on a sparkling summer day, the zip wire ride for the torch in Newcastle, the disabled war hero Ben Parkinson being cheered through Doncaster. The mood in the country seemed to have become exuberant. People wanted a party, and they wanted the Olympics to work. But I never lost the feeling of just how easy it would be for that to change and for disaster to strike.
The experience in Beijing of the oppressive atmosphere generated by terrorism hundreds of miles away had stayed with me, and we used to talk within our team about the catastrophic effect of even a minor bomb incident anywhere in the UK but especially in London. The Olympic Park was as secure as humanly possible, but what if there had been an explosion in a supermarket in Newham or in Kensington or beyond? The effect on foreign competitors and visitors, and on the spirit of the Games, would have been terrible. We felt some reassurance after visiting the secret command centre for London 2012, where all the key agencies were working together: transport, the police, the armed forces and, I assume, the intelligence services. Everything that could be done was being done, though the fear of a ‘lone wolf’ attack never went away.
The other worry remained the opening ceremony, because it would so much define London’s Games. Even knowing that its concept was brilliant and so were many of the elements, I was beset by doubt in the run-up to 27 July. Our team knew there were so many things that could go wrong. Early rehearsals had revealed that a downpour significantly affected the timings: the green and pleasant land became much heavier, composed as it was of proper turf, and was therefore much slower to rip up and carry away. But it was wind rather than rain that was thought to be the bigger enemy. If the wind was too strong, the parachute jump at the end of the Queen/Bond film would be ruled out on the grounds of safety. The weather forecast became a subject of obsessive study.
There were public dress rehearsals for the ceremony in the final week of preparations, but before those we had a private run-through in the stadium on a warm and lovely Saturday evening. We made our way to our seats as some of the cast were arriving, with sheep being guided across the concourse and a flock of geese being released into the bucolic setting. The audience comprised LOCOG officials, a BBC team and the folk from NBC. NBC had a barbecue to mark the occasion, while we shared LOCOG’s curled-up sandwiches. It was that night that we knew what an incredible moment the Industrial Revolution sequence would be: the visceral thrill of the shout of the workers as they flooded onto the field of play, and the brilliance of the creation of the Olympic rings out of molten steel. But we saw how easy it was for things to go awry. A chimney stack stuttered rather than soared skywards, and the inflatable house for the big dance number didn’t inflate properly. The giant baby at the end of the NHS sequence wasn’t ready – a blessing, thought some – and came close to being axed from the show. If you watched from the stadium, some of the dancing by NHS staff was, understandably, a bit of a shambles because they were not dance professionals; and in none of the rehearsals did the Queen and Bond film appear. Some secrets were too good to share, even given the impressive discipline of the cast and preview audiences.
We never saw the lighting of the cauldron being rehearsed, either. This was also intended to be a moment of wonder, though – like many things – it had come close to being revealed ahead of the Games. One night in the spring I had been called by Jackie Brock-Doyle about some aerial footage being shown on BBC News of the preparations being made for the ceremonies. ‘Get it taken off,’ she said, with the hard edge in her voice that I had come to recognise and fear. ‘You can see the outline of the cauldron, and it blows the entire secret!’ And it was true that, if you knew what you were looking for, the design of the cauldron was exposed on some of Britain’s top news programmes. Fortunately, nobody did work out what it was, and my iron rule – never to interfere with news programmes – held.
That said, there were some oddities about sponsoring both news and sport coverage. Some of the people working for me in the online news area of the 2012 team were trying to find out about Games secrets that were known fully by other people in my team sitting just a few desks from them. This respect for ‘Chinese Walls’ reached its height in an interview with Danny Boyle, done ahead of the event by Huw Edwards, who also knew everything that was in the ceremony. Huw tried to tempt Danny on air to reveal a secret or two. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t. Again, this represents the balance we had to strike between journalism – which should be sacrosanct – and not spoiling the surprises of the most spectacular show in Britain for generations. We treated it like a story where there is an embargo and details cannot be released ahead of a specific time. The other part of the balancing act was to make a successful television programme out of the sometimes frenetic goings-on in the stadium. But that had been sorted for us and the rest of the world’s broadcasters by the Boyle vision: his ceremony was always conceived as a television show, or indeed a live film. Hence his prolonged battle with the host broadcaster OBS to ensure that it was his own cameras and directors who captured the ceremony, and that they had been involved from the start, rather than entrust it to people flown in a fortnight before the event. He had also thought carefully about the role of TV commentary. There was one of those 180-degree inaccurate stories in the papers that had said Danny was bothered by the idea of Huw Edwards and our commentators talking all over his beloved ceremony, when in fact Danny had told us from the start that he had imagined the points where Huw would need to speak. There were poin
ts of transition where an explanation was necessary, and he had always heard them in his head being spoken in Huw’s voice.
The morning of the day of the opening ceremony was enlivened by one of the more amusing manifestations of the Cultural Olympiad. At twelve minutes past eight, we broadcast Martin Creed’s ‘Work No. 1197’. This had the rubric ‘all the bells in a country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes’, which prompted the excitable arts community to proclaim that ‘everyone will ring a bell!’, while our communications chief Louisa Fyans asked plaintively how this could be construed as an art work. But it felt appropriately celebratory. It raised interest from Chris Evans on Radio 2 and from breakfast television – and then from all news outlets when the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, managed to propel part of his bell towards a bystander thanks to his enthusiastic ringing. There were jokes about dropped clangers, and worse, but it added to the gaiety of the nation.
Back in the office, I watched the final versions of the films made by BBC Sport for the two hours of live coverage before the ceremony began, and they lived up to my hopes. There was the wonderful ‘opener’ featuring Benedict Cumberbatch, adding poetry to the excitement of the day, and in the immediate run-up to the ceremony we played a beautifully crafted history of London by Andrew Marr. It included the way London had come through the Blitz and more recent challenges like 7/7, and it was high-end, ambitious television. This was not a night for easy populism: it deserved the care and professionalism that it got.