Alert: what follows is a personal view.

I just wanted to cast a little light on things for our friends outside the UK lest they think the Ceremony represented what Britain is all about.

Personally, I found it a pity that the producer Danny Boyle let his left-leaning politics show through. I was angry at his preaching to people at a point where their defences were down.

Boyle's twisted version of our history seems to be:
England's green and pleasant land was once occupied by free and happy peasants frollicking in a William Blake idyll ('Jerusalem builded here...' etc.), then their serenity was destroyed by evil capitalists, led by a greedy-looking Isambard Kingdom Brunel (one of our greatest engineers actually - what a bloody insult to his memory) and his tribe of top-hated fat cats. The wonderful, innocent peasants were then used as slaves in the steel mills. Cut to the National Health Service (wha???????) and all the lovely little children (cheap 'puppy-dog' appeal). The 'storybook' monsters chased away by Mary Poppins was a barely-concealed metaphor for the present Government's reformers who are trying to turn the NHS money-gulping, inefficient leviathan into something we can actually afford, before it finally consumes every tax pound we can pay.

Boyle was crafty; sugaring the communist message pill with the Mr Bean nonsense (what WAS that all about? He was a TV star twenty years ago and never funny), and the Bond/Queen sketch. NB: It looked to me that at no time were Daniel Craig and the Queen really in the same shot - it looked matted in to me. Not to worry, that's the magic of film making.

Boyle completely left out our military personnel (apart from some red-coated Chelsea Pensioners who just walked along a bit), and his disgracefully short acknowledgement of the fallen in two World Wars was only included because no doubt he empathises with what he would call the 'cannon fodder' and so wouldn't countenance praising the actual present armed forces as they are part of an unnecessary invasive war in Afghanistan.

Ah well. Sorry about the rant, but Boyle just couldn't resist trying to re-write history when he knew he had such a one-time opportunity in front of a record audience.

The special FX were excellent though!