Danny Boyle, the man overseeing the opening ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics, revealed on Friday that it will be called "Isles of Wonder" and involve a big bell and lots of nurses. The latter was a tribute to the National Health Service, a public organisation the film director said Britons took particular pride in, while the title came from arguably the greatest of all playwrights, William Shakespeare.
A giant bell cast especially for the ceremony, which is in exactly six months' time, will ring out to mark the beginning of festivities. Boyle, the Oscar-winning director of "Slumdog Millionaire", told reporters he was aiming for a less spectacular show than some recent games, in part as a result of budget constraints.
"We wanted to make the feel of the opening ceremony ... intimate and personal," he said. "We didn't want to slavishly be bossed about by the TV audience, which is a billion people and it is not insignificant. "But we wanted the 80,000 people who were lucky enough to be in there (the stadium) to be the conduit through which you feel this experience."
His idea was to emulate Sydney's opening ceremony in 2000 rather than that of Beijing in 2008. "Obviously the spectacle of Beijing was just breathtaking, the scale of it, and the beauty of Athens (2004) is very, very inspiring, but I have to say Sydney is something that has inspired us because Sydney got some of the feel of a people's games.
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