‘Sunday’s closing ceremony was utter rubbish’

IT’s been a weird fortnight or so. Eighteen days ago, Britain got slipped a cheeky dose of unbridled optimism courtesy of the Olympics opening ceremony.

The resulting high was long and beautiful and made us naturallycynical Brits believe in a better way of thinking and being.

Sunday’s stinking closing ceremony was the comedown… and we’re all going to be paying for it in every sense for a long, long time.

The best of British music was the prevailing theme and the budget mustn’t have stretched far enough for us to have different songs all the way through as we got ‘classics’ from Madness, Pet Shop Boys and Blur repeated over and over the first hour.

One Direction performed that song they do while on the back of a moving lorry – although sadly it wasn’t travelling at the kind of speed that could have jeopardised the well-being of their pretty young bodies.

The good stuff was all saved until after the medal-winning athletes trudged on and milled about for a bit before being kettled in the middle of the Olympic Stadium, in traditional British style.

Rumour had it that they were allowed to leave early if they traded in their medals on the way out, with games organisers hoping to save a few quid on precious metals ahead of Rio in 2016.

Thankfully, in the commentary box Trevor Nelson’s involvement was kept to a minimum, although he did tell a tall tale of mingling in London’s bars and clubs with medal-wielding, party-loving athletes.

“It’s like the friendly games,” he observed. Yes, as opposed to Barcelona 1992, when winning athletes famously had knife fights up and down Las Ramblas with each other, eh Trev? We must never forget the sight of medal-decorated corpses piled up in the gutters.

Whereas Danny Boyle ransacked his achingly cool record collection for the opening ceremony, sadly the music choice for the closing bash came straight out of the CD rack of his distant cousin Susan.

George Michael stayed awake long enough to perform, but he wasn’t alert enough to realise that doing your brand new single as part of a celebration of classic music of the past 50 years makes you look like one of the biggest losers alive.

No, wait, I forgot about Russell Brand. The posh-mouthed trampa-like chose to make his singing debut with an awful cover of I Am The Walrus. It’s comfortably The Beatles’ worst song, and Brand offered nothing that could improve it.

The closest we got to actual Beatledom was the unwelcome appearance of Oasis tribute act Beady Eye. Their singer bears a startling resemblance to Liam Gallagher but chose to mainly sing Wonderwall out of his nose instead. Shame.

Those creaking MILF-pop princesses the Spice Girls pitched up as well, astride some London taxis, trilling out a couple of their long-forgotten hits. They’re so utterly pointless in 2012 that they might as well be the Bay City Rollers, or Muse.

Oh look — it’s Muse! With their official Olympic song and a performance that was so over the top that even Freddie Mercury would have paused and said ‘now hang on a minute chaps, this might turn one or two stomachs, no?’

What WOULD have turned stomachs would have been Queen reforming with Boris Johnson on vocals, or Take That appearing with the roly-poly comedy Mayor replacing the absent Robbie Williams. Those things almost actually happened, apart from the Boris stuff, obviously.

Instead, it came to an end with what’s left of The Who being wheeled out. They’re seasoned veterans at these big events and their appearance was about as surprising as Ian Thorpe beginning a sentence with ‘Look….’

In truth, the parade of utter rubbish that was plopped in front of our eyes and ears was a master stroke. Following the splendour of the past couple of weeks, it’s allowed us all to return to our natural British state of being rubbish at stuff and slagging things off for no good reason.

Ah, that feels better!