The Olympics will essentialy be the starting point of two tier humanity. Mark my words.

Three tier then. Who said you could talk to me?

Until the Olympics, yes.

I wasn't talking to you, I was talking at you!

Opening Ceremony anyone? 
It's quite clever in it's use of video, but it's not been particularly memorable so far.

It's alright. Colourful.

Can't be doing with the English commentary to these. It's people dapping about for entertainment, but of course we always dig up the travails of our ancestors, embellishing them with big talk of storms, epic journeys, and murderous protectors of sheep.

As if those people dreamt that one day their efforts'd be remembered via interpretative dance in a televised ceremony, featuring - I'unno - plastic boulders or whatever it is this year. Entertainment, yes, but just get on with it!

Same with the fireworks in London every NYE - ‘but what do the colours and patterns signify?!’ Asked no-one.

Opening ceremonies aren't really spectator events. Surely a seemingly endless line of people waving flags is of no interest to anyone other than those taking part.

They're not generally great television, but they are usually great to be at with a television camera.
That even makes the athletes parade special because you get to see the excitement and wonder in the athletes first hand in incredible detail. It's not something that really translates to tv, but it's pretty magical if you're actually there.
It's their moment, and you get to eavesdrop on it, so to speak.

I've come to the opinion that the Olympics should be considering scaling down anyhow and not just with respect to the the ceremonial bit. It has got a bit out of hand. Overall the crippling costs mean a reducing number of states can afford to host them - and that can't be good.That stadium looks like an ornate cake at a pauper's wedding.

The ceremony was all right and that's all it has to be.

Lovely init!

The end of this road race has been cracking. Caught some... enjoyable beach volleyball earlier too. BBC's set up seems top notch so far.

Great ending to that race. You'd struggle to script that.

The sound supervisors fucked it. It was a colourful, if stripped back, production, but you just couldn't hear any of the sound.
There are two reasons for this.

The main OBS sound supervisor fucked his mix by going for an audience atmos sound mix that leaned far too heavily on the atmos side of things. This was a big mistake as it put all the music too low in his mix so you really couldn't hear most of it. Any sound mixer worth their salt would have blended the atmos mix with a direct feed of the music.

Then to compound an already dreadful mix, the BBC sound supervisor took the lazy option and just left the bbc commentary mics faded up for the entire duration so the comms could just prattle on whenever they felt like it. These mics were also overpoweringly loud in the bbc's mix which just fucked what little was left from the already poor OBS mix.

Lazy, lazy BBC. They always fuck events by doing this. The director should be cueing his commentary team when he thinks its appropriate for them to speak, leaving his sound supervisor to actually balance the mics against the OBS mix.
BBC are fannies though, so they've just faded everything up and then sat back to watch the ceremony rather than do a decent job.

When the Brazilian team entered a rammed stadium to rapturous applause and music and singing and general awesomeness, you couldn't actually hear any of it.

fannies

g.man

Heh. First thing I'd do would be fire virtually everyone