English MLA Format Eaasy research about olympic games impact society through T.V

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JPTV 1 (1) pp. 113–120 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of Popular Television Volume 1 Number 1

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Olympic Dossier. English language. doi: 10.1386/jptv.1.1.113_1

AnitA Biressi University of Roehampton

HeAtHer nunn University of Roehampton

the London 2012 Olympic

Games Opening Ceremony:

History answers back

ABstrACt

This article highlights the distinctive turn in public discourse towards historical resources, analogies and stories to help citizens make sense of the current era of austerity through a selective analysis of the media coverage of the London 2012 Olympic Games. It argues that in straitened times British citizens are being asked to make do, to accept the rolling back of state provision and to modify their expectations of a civil society on the basis of historical myths as well as current realities. Having noted this, the article asks where on television are the counter-discourses that may also wish to lay a claim to a national history and to tell national stories and even to contest the dismantling of the welfare state? How might these spaces work to resist the prevalent criticism of public services, organized labour and popular protest and to defend the class (and other) politics and values with which these have been histor- ically associated? In answer to these questions this article offers a brief considera- tion of the ways in which the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony deployed history and historical reference.

KeywOrds

Olympic Games Opening Ceremony historical resources austerity televised re-enactment counter-history

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During this age of austerity no one can have failed to notice how British tele- vised national events such as the Royal Wedding and the Diamond Jubilee have been deployed to conjure up wartime fortitude and a nostalgic commu- nity spirit. This was also true of the news coverage running up to the London 2012 Olympic Games and to some degree of the Games itself. These last took place in Britain in 1948 and were consequently known as the ‘Austerity Games’, so naturally they chimed with current times and invited the airing of personal recollections of shoe-string sports and ‘making do’. Ahead of the Games, the Second World War Home Front and post-war years were invoked at every turn. For example, when cyclist Bradley Wiggins stepped forward to ring the bell at the start of the Opening Ceremony the BBC commentator urged him to ‘keep calm and carry on’, using a slogan from the mid-twentieth- century Home Front which is now ubiquitous in British media and marketing. Likewise when Team GB had failed to win a gold medal several days into the Games Britons were also advised by the Daily Telegraph (Rayner, Marsden and Magnay 2012) to ‘keep calm and carry on’.

While media commentary rightly marvelled at the ingenuity of post-war domestic resilience and camaraderie and the telling contrast with the lavish, thoroughly corporatized contemporary Games, others found a way to link them to a more bellicose bulldog attitude. For example, in a hyperbolic Times newspaper piece by-now predictably entitled ‘Keep calm and carry on: how the wartime spirit will help protect the London Games’, readers were reas- sured that:

Not since 1940 has Britain erected such a mighty ring of steel around London – a vast, multilayered, armoured force that everyone hopes (just as they hoped in the Second World War) will shield the capital, and never have to be used. [...] But in some ways the threats, and the chal- lenge, are similar: to prepare for any and every eventuality. [...] Those tactics worked in 1940, and they will probably work in 2012.

(Macintyre 2012)

Through these and other commentaries the Olympic Games, which was both a global media spectacle and a corporate event, became the focus of fairly conservative domestic discourses rooted in myths of national identity and national history (see Rowe and Stevenson 2006: 197). So what are the political implications of what Rebecca Bramall (2011: 68) has described as the ‘insist- ence upon historical solutions for today’s problems’; solutions that seem to be monopolized mainly by conservative voices in the public sphere? In this case we suggest that the ration-book years were referenced to emphasize embat- tlement and resourcefulness. As such they arguably helped frame current austerity measures as painful but necessary and reminded the public that the only rational and patriotic response to increasingly difficult times must be stoic cooperation (see Hatherley 2009; Gilbert 2011; Biressi and Nunn, in press).

Having sketched these quite predictable usages of historical references in the media, however, we want to explore the possibility that the actual Olympic Opening Ceremony deployed similar historical resources to produce a quite different set of interpretations of the past in the present. It has been argued that for oppositional voices, especially for those from the left of the political spectrum, the historical past is difficult to latch on to progres- sive projects (Bonnett 2010). It is far easier to co-opt historical resources to critique individual conduct than it is to turn them against the vested interests

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of the power elite. Where on television are the public spaces for counter- discourses that may also wish to lay a claim to a national history and to tell national stories and even to contest the dismantling of the welfare state? How might these work to resist the prevalent criticism of public services, organized labour and popular protest and to defend the class (and other) politics and values with which these have been historically associated? Bearing in mind these questions this article offers a brief consideration of the ways in which the 2012 London Olympics deployed history and historical reference in its 27 July Opening Ceremony. In doing so we will by-pass issues of authenticity, revelation and experience (the usual markers of historical truth) and instead raise the possibility that it provided a space for a counter-austerity discourse that invited viewers to query prevailing political messages. In other words, we wonder whether we might positively read the Olympic Games’s re-enactment of Britain’s history (its ‘island story’) in the context of a hugely commercial- ized, global media event, as a retort to or refusal of ‘the dominant articulation of austerity to an argument about morality and the necessity of welfare cuts’ (Bramall 2011: 82).

‘isLes Of wOnder’: HistOry Answers BACK

We noted above that the much anticipated London 2012 Games provided opportunities for the media to advocate keeping calm and carrying on, includ- ing through references to the earlier Austerity Games, the ongoing prepara- tions and security and even in the opening phrases of the BBC commentary. So far, so unsurprising. However, the Opening Ceremony itself arguably fash- ioned a less predictable national story from commonly shared and widely recognized historical resources. The ceremony, entitled ‘Isles of Wonder’, was devised by film-maker Danny Boyle and scripted by Frank Cottrell Boyce. The two men’s professional credentials were many and varied although they also shared an Irish Catholic heritage, working-class sympathies and a collabora- tive professional relationship. Boyce is a film-writer, a former critic for Living Marxism, a novelist and quondam writer for several well-loved British soap operas. Boyle is best known for the post-class, post-realist films Trainspotting (1996) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which dealt innovatively with charac- ters living severely impoverished lives at the edge of civil society. The show they devised for the Games arguably bore the hallmarks of their earlier work and the values with which these were invested and we propose here that at the very least it offered TV audiences alternative historical resources with which to furnish an interpretation of current times. To pursue this, we begin then with a necessarily selective synopsis of the dense, complex and diverse entertainment which we would argue was comprised of a kind of bricolage of well-known historical elements recombined to create counter-discourses to those described above (with all quotations from the BBC commentary).

Following a two-minute film and an audience countdown the live enter- tainment began several minutes after 9 p.m. on 27 July. The first sequence encapsulated British economic and social development from a rural economy to the Industrial Revolution and then on to the 1960s. Scenes of a bucolic agrarian life were played out against Glastonbury Tor counterpointed with the four ‘unofficial anthems’ of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. As the performances progressed, vintage coaches entered the stadium, carrying men in nineteenth-century dress led by the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. After ascending the Tor, Brunel delivered verses from

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the outcast Caliban’s ‘Be not afeard’ speech from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Green fields disappeared as chimney stacks rose from the ground in a dark and dynamic son et lumière setting signifying a hellish ‘pandae- monium’. Agricultural workers were banished from the land. Here industrial workers forged what was to become the linked golden Olympic rings ‘against the backdrop of industrial turmoil’ and with Brunel looking on approvingly. This part of the show also included a period of silence in remembrance of the two world wars, featuring ordinary British ‘Tommies’ and a field of poppies. A variety of historical subjects arrived on the scene who had contributed towards changes in British social and political life including members of the suffragette movement and the Jarrow hunger march of 1936, as well as Caribbean immigrants from the Windrush years and The Beatles. Real-life Chelsea pensioners and pearly kings and queens (‘the other royal family’) also featured. The sequence ended with the performers looking up, dazzled, at the interlocked Olympic rings.

The next sequence celebrated the National Health Service and children’s literature with a choreographed show of nurses wearing vaguely mid-century uniforms and children on hospital beds. The scene segued into a story-book world featuring the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Hughes, 1968) and in which Harry Potter’s arch enemy Voldemort (Rowling 1997) is defeated by a host of Mary Poppins figures, the fictional English nanny (Stevenson, 1964). Here children were rescued, perhaps by a metaphorical nanny-state, to be returned to the safety of their beds. The sequence ended with the appear- ance of a giant newborn baby. These happenings were accompanied by a roughly chronological sampling of British popular music and ended with an appearance by World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The conclusion was a memorial to the victims of the July 2005 London bombings. Throughout the show synchronized performers, viewed from above, formed shapes and symbols including the moon and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) logo. There were also filmed sequences, live music of all kinds and comedy sketches. This was both a pageant and a party and what Dayan and Katz (1992: 1) have described as a ‘festive viewing of television’. It was also a depiction of history mostly from the perspective of ordinary people. It was, to borrow a phrase from Patrick Wright (1985: 5), a fair attempt at ‘a vernacular and informal history’.

Evidently, the sequences fused fiction, surrealist imagery, historical refer- ences and historical storytelling. More than 7000 non-professionals took part including 600 real-life hospital staff, health workers and patients. It was also a conspicuously multicultural event with no concession made towards the historical realism often seen in British costume drama which routinely excludes black actors. This participation of numerous volunteers signalled too the status of the show as a kind of grand-scale historical re-enactment. This inclusion naturally framed it quite differently from the earlier examples of redeployed historical resources discussed above. As Jerome de Groot (2009) explains in his book Consuming History, historical re-enactment, at the very least, suggests a democratizing or progressive relationship to history; perhaps because it operates at the production as well as the consumption end of the process of historical storytelling. In de Groot’s words (2009: 103 emphasis in the original) re-enactment offers ‘a range of experience within history and a complexity of consumption’; it can be an appealing combination of play, sociality, self-improvement and educational enrichment harnessed to enter- tainment, art or politics. ‘Isles of Wonder’ fitted the bill, performing cultural

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work which could also be political work through a meshing of popular culture, historical reference and social commentary, and all via the wide-reaching, accessible medium of television.

It seemed that as festive television the show was received with great pleas- ure and some bemusement (especially by non-Brits for whom some of the jokes were obscure or who failed to understand why the Health Service should be quite so prominent). Early reports suggested that the show would also be read politically. Conservative MP Aidan Burley tweeted his disgruntlement about ‘the most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen’ while a Labour Member of Parliament (MP) blogged his delight as the ‘Trojan Horse’ smuggled ‘progres- sive socialist sentiments’ into the arena by conspicuously featuring the work- ing class, a multicultural cast and so on (in Murray 2012). A reading of opinion in the left-leaning Observer newspaper underlined its generally positive but multifaceted reception with historian and MP Tristram Hunt remarking that it could be said that ‘while the right has won the economic arguments, the left took victory in the “culture wars”’ (Ai et al. 2012).

Others variously praised the Opening Ceremony’s ‘collective vision’, its ‘brave’ celebration of the welfare state, its affirmation of the Act of Union and the monarchy, its creation of a ‘new myth’ of social diversity and so on (Ai et al. 2012). This suggested a contradictory but open and optimistic text that offered audiences multiple points of engagement. The perceived opti- mism of the show also chimed with Boyle’s own programme notes (2012) that maintained that running through the spectacle would be a glimpse of ‘a single golden thread of purpose – the idea of Jerusalem – of the better world’. Boyle’s personal statement (2012) fused past and present, the radical and the conservative, an idea and a dream into his depiction of ‘a world that can be built through the prosperity of industry, through the caring nation that built the welfare state, through the joyous energy of popular culture, through the dream of universal communication’. Boyle’s references to Jerusalem also, of course, conjured up an interpretation and memory of the post-war austerity years that was quite different to those invoked by the ‘keep calm’ mantra. The utopian golden thread, the ‘better world’ clearly recalled and valorized the political impulses, principles and philosophy that had underpinned the pursuit of the ‘New Jerusalem’ under the British Labour government of 1945–51. That government, which presided over the austerity years so frequently referenced in current public discourse and popular culture, had initiated a radical project of social and economic reorganization that included the founding of ‘cradle to grave’ state care and the nationalization of industries and the Bank of England. It thereby implemented a programme of Keynesian economics that advocated a mixed economy which included a significant role for the public sector; an economic model which was increasingly maligned and rejected until the recent financial crisis prompted an urgent reassessment of its value. This then is a quite different view of both the past and the present ages of austerity and one effectively communicated as an ‘interruption of the routine and normal flow of broadcasting’ (Dayan and Katz 1992: 5).

In sum, in these and other ways which we have no space to address here, ‘Isles of Wonder’ arguably offered a counter-history and a counter-argument; one which reminded British audiences as citizens and social actors why the public sector (the supported arts, welfare, health and perhaps even public serv- ice television) should be valued and defended and why social enfranchisement mattered. In contrast to the political and media references to the modern mid- century that advocated stoicism and compliance, this living historical patchwork

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invoked a more dynamic and assertive interpretation of the past and its appli- cation to the present crisis. There is much to critique in a historical perform- ance such as ‘Isles of Wonder’, which took place in a thoroughly corporatized, securitized commercial environment. But in Patrick Wright’s terms (1985) it could also be argued that the ceremony attempted a kind of ‘re-enchantment’ of everyday life worked through as a ‘history from below’ (Thompson 1963) rather than simply a spell-binding diversion. A plethora of class and political protestors, soldiers and health service workers, factory hands and rural labour- ers overwhelmingly possessed the historical and televisual field.

This enchantment was effected most importantly perhaps through the ceremony’s embodied performance of the past in the present and its ener- getic co-option of historical resources, which allowed for more open, more progressive readings and reception. We discern in ‘Isles of Wonder’ traces of other historical reconstructions, pageants, protests and marches that have undertaken the complex cultural work of sociality, solidarity, education and entertainment. Those with a political-critical inflection might arguably include artist Jeremy Deller’s 2001 televised re-enactment of the ‘Battle of Orgreave’, which restaged the British miners’ strike of 1984–85, the Welsh Port Talbot immersive theatrical production Passion Play (2011) whose production proc- esses were filmed as a two-part documentary, and even the recent adoption of Guy Fawkes masks by anti-capitalist political activists. Happenings such as these placed non-professional performers, protestors and political actors at their centre to sample and reuse history and to retell national or local stories of collective life, of social history and of political activism. Above all they made space to pursue a qualitatively and politically different kind of public remem- bering; a remembering which answers back to official history and the ways it is deployed to understand and manage the inequalities, economic strategies and the constraints of the social present.

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Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (in press), Class and Contemporary British Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Our Kingdom, 28 January, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/ jeremy-gilbert/sharing-pain-emotional-politics-of-austerity. Accessed 29 July 2012.

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Groot, J. de (2009), Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, Abingdon: Routledge.

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suGGested CitAtiOn

Biressi, A. and Nunn, H. (2013), ‘The London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony: History answers back’, Journal of Popular Television, 1: 1, pp. 113–120, doi: 10.1386/jptv.1.1.113_1

COntriButOr detAiLs

Anita Biressi is Reader in Media Cultures at the University of Roehampton, United Kingdom. Her research interests include media spectacle, tabloid journalism, class and culture. She is the author of Crime, Fear and the Law (2001). Her publications produced with Heather Nunn include Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (2005), The Tabloid Culture Reader (2008) and Class and Contemporary British Culture (in press).

Contact: Reader in Media Cultures, University of Roehampton, Department of Media, Culture and Language, Southlands College, Room QB026, Roehampton Lane, London, SW15 5SL, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Heather Nunn is Professor of Culture and Politics and Director of the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures at the University

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of Roehampton, United Kingdom. Her research interests include political communication, formations of gender and class, documentary and factual television and images of childhood. She is the author of Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy (2002). Her publications produced with Anita Biressi include Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (2005), The Tabloid Culture Reader (2008) and Class and Contemporary British Culture (in press).

Contact: Professor of Culture and Politics, University of Roehampton, Department of Media, Culture and Language, Southlands College, Room QB006, Roehampton Lane, London, SW15 5SL, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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