Requiem for a dream

The opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics was a celebration of Britain. What happened to the feel-good factor?

- Steve Rose

DREAMS FIGURED PROMINENTLY IN the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony. The first speaker of the night was Kenneth Branagh, channelling both Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Shakespeare's Caliban: "The clouds methought would open, and show riches. Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked, I cried to dream again!" A section was devoted to children's bedtime nightmares. Rowan Atkinson lapsed into a dream during his cameo. And hallucinatory spectacles such as the Queen jumping out of a helicopter with James Bond made 900 million viewers around the world wonder if they were the ones dreaming.

Ten years on, the whole ceremony feels more dreamlike than ever. This was Britain as a rich, diverse, multicultural, imaginative, inventive nation comfortable with its identity and capable of reconciling its contradictions. We were traditional yet modern. We were powerful yet caring. We were orderly yet anarchic. We had a vast back catalogue of world-changing culture. We knew how to put on a good show.

Jonathan Coe summed up the feelings of many in his 2018 novel Middle England, which devotes a whole chapter to various characters watching the ceremony, including Doug, the sceptical journalist (who writes for, er, the Guardian): "What he felt while watching it were the stirrings of an emotion he hadn't experienced for years - had never really experienced at all, perhaps ... Yes, why not come straight out and admit it, at this moment he felt proud, proud to be British, proud to be part of a nation which had not only achieved such great things but could now celebrate them with such confidence and irony and lack of self-importance."