Recoil after Volleyball

I missed the Olympic opening celebration of Britishness, because I fell asleep reading a Max Hastings book. That's how Daily Telegraph I am.

Danny Boyle did himself proud, I'm sure, but only if his show featured:

• Steptoe & Son;
• couples taking their dogs for romantic weekends in Cotswold hotels;
• Mrs T trailing a bottle of Bells about her bedroom, wearing slippers made of Argies and miners;
• students trying to force down a Guinness;
• Ollie Reed mumbling an apology to an understanding Eddie Izzard;
• pink-eyed kids marching down a Newcastle street, playing kazoos;
• synchronised tutting;
• Sir Sean Connery wearing one of the Scottish man-skirts, pissed on a Marbella beach;
• The Question Time audience waking up in Iran;
• Shaky wrestling Richard out of Richard & Judy; and
• Edward VIII finding out the hard way that Wallis Simpson was a man.

All narrated by the ghost of John Osborne. Anything less, and we might as well be westerly Dutchmen.