Oscillating between fist-eating dullness and unadulterated camp chaos, it’s hard to know what to say about the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony. Euro pop? Robo-horse? Naked blue man under cloche? So, so many boats? Watching brought up myriad complex emotions, none of them coherent – which, counterintuitively, put me in perfect step with this bonkers, boring show. What is there to compare an Olympic opening ceremony to? When else does a country cut together a four-hour long rendition of its own greatest hits, composed primarily of live acts that inevitably look terrible on television? Once every four years, that’s when! I watched so you didn’t have to! The first ceremony ever held outside a stadium, threading instead through the city via its legendary river Seine, Paris mixed up the usual format – fun performances first, interminable flag-trooping later – by interspersing the boring-but-necessary procession of athletes with its cabaret of national clichés.
That approach was a mixed bag – on the one hand, it was nice to have the seemingly endless flotilla of national boats carrying athletes interrupted every now and then. On the other, it drew out the boat thing for what felt like several years; even the pleasure of saying “ha!” about geographically unlikely pairings, thrown together in French alphabetical order, had worn off by the time we got to Central African Republic and Canada, let alone Portugal and Qatar. As such, there was a lot of pressure on t.