I fear for the Olympic opening ceremony. If last Mondays 'Queens Jubilee Concert' was anything to go by we are in for the most excruciating few hours of national shame ever to be foisted onto a people by it's govenors. Dig your hole now is my advice - the ground may need a bit of help swallowing all of us at once.

What went wrong you may ask. Well, aside from the questionable wisdom of making an 86 yo woman sit through three hours of ancient rock and pop music out in the cold it's difficult to know where to start. The presenters is as good a place as  I suppose. To put (supposedly) cutting edge comedians in as link artists between the acts was folly in the extreme. They could not perform their normal material that (supposedly) makes them funny because it is pepered with F words and obscenity and they could not make the palsied matereal they were given (or allowed) anything other than embarrasing to watch. They were emasculated to a one by the setting and should not have touched it with a barge pole. The spectacle of Rolf Harris trying to get the crowd to sing 'Two Little Boys' as a time filler will ever be seared into my shuddering memory - but ten out of ten to the old trooper for having a go; a true proffesional even if he does have a pencant for over schmaltzy sentiment. Peter Kay gave sighns of being alive, but only just and similarly Lenny Henry.

But for me the main problem was the artists them selves. We were treated to a fistfull of aged performers battleing to belt out thier oldie hit songs in the way they did forty years ago and failing miserably. They croaked the high notes; they avoided them altogether if they coud, thereby ruining the songs; they swivelled thier arthritic hips with barely concealed groans of pain as they pretended to be young again for a day. There was not the one of them that you didn't want to sit down with a mug of coco and put a blanket across thier knees. Elton John, Paul McArtney, Cliff Richard - do your self respect a favour and never - never - set foot on a stage again. Notable exeptions here were Tom Jones who sounded as good as ever and (amazingly) Grace Jones whose hip swivelling skills would have put a Bankok ladyboy on the catwalk to shame. Stevie Wonder could just about pass muster and JLS did what they do tolerably but Gary Barlow and Cheryl Coles almost complete abcence of talent when away from the tweaked world of the recording studio was clear for all to see.

Now the point is this. All this was ok to us and even bought a lump to our throats because we know these people. These are our institutions, our history. It will not however cut it with the rest of the world. What we can forgive in the rose tinted wash of our sentimentality on our Queens day, will not do for the rest of the world. I read aghast that Sir Paul McArtney is to close the opening ceremony of the Olympics. (Noooo!!..........echoing away down into the pit of pre-disaster anticipation) No - this will not do. China gives the world 50,000 people choreographed to almost automaton levels of synchronicity and complexity with men with jet packs flying all over the arena and we offer up Paul McArtney. Please guys - please! Do not do this to us! We do ceremony better than any country in the world (exept perhaps the yanks) - let us do what we are good at. Or perhaps even better - do nothing at all. I mean it. Do nothing - scale it back to zilch rather than stage a fiasco of past it rock stars and ill prepared kids and comedians for the world to laugh at. We deserve better.