2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

The opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics took place on the evening of Friday 27 July 2012 in the Olympic Stadium, London, during which the Games were formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II. As mandated by the Olympic Charter, the proceedings combined the ceremonial opening of this international sporting event (including welcoming speeches, hoisting of the flags and the parade of athletes) with an artistic spectacle to showcase the host nation's culture. The spectacle was entitled Isles of Wonder and directed by the Academy Award-winning British film director Danny Boyle, with Paulette Randall as associate director.

Prior to London 2012, there had been considerable apprehension about Britain's ability to stage an opening ceremony that could reach the standard set at the Beijing Summer Games of 2008. The 2008 ceremony had been noted for its scale, extravagance and expense, hailed as the "greatest ever", and had cost £65m. In contrast, London spent an estimated £27m (out of £80m budgeted for its four ceremonies), which was nevertheless about twice the original budget. Nonetheless, the London opening ceremony was immediately seen as a tremendous success, widely praised as a "masterpiece" and "a love letter to Britain".

The ceremony began at 21:00 BST and lasted almost four hours. It was watched by an estimated worldwide television audience of 900 million, falling short of the IOC's 1.5 billion viewership estimate for the 2008 ceremony, but becoming the most viewed in the UK and US. The content had largely been kept secret before the performance, despite involving thousands of volunteers and two public rehearsals. The principal sections of the artistic display represented Britain's Industrial Revolution, National Health Service, literary heritage, popular music and culture, and were noted for their vibrant storytelling and use of music. Two shorter sections drew particular comment, involving a filmed cameo appearance of the Queen with James Bond as her escort, and a live performance by the London Symphony Orchestra joined by comedian Rowan Atkinson. These were widely ascribed to Britain's sense of humour. The ceremony featured children and young people in most of its segments, reflecting the "inspire a generation" aspiration of London's original bid for the Games.

The BBC released footage of the entire opening ceremony on 29 October 2012, edited by Danny Boyle and with background extras, along with more than seven hours of sporting highlights and the complete closing ceremony.

Preparations

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) approached Danny Boyle to be the director of the ceremony in June 2010, and he immediately accepted. Boyle explained that there had been four things that made him take the job: he was a big Olympics fan, he lived a mile from the Stadium and so felt invested in the area, his late father's birthday was on the ceremony's date, and he felt his "Oscar clout" would enable him to push through what he wanted to do. He said it "felt weirdly more like a ... civic or national responsibility" to take the job.

Boyle acknowledged that the extravagance of the 2008 opening ceremony was an impossible act to follow — "you can't get bigger than Beijing" — and that this realisation had in fact liberated his team creatively. He said "..obviously I'm not going to try and build on Beijing, because how could you? We can't, and you wouldn't want to, so we're going back to the beginning. We're going to try and give the impression that we're rethinking and restarting, because they've (opening ceremonies) escalated since Los Angeles in 1984. They've tried to top themselves each time and you can't do that after Beijing." Beijing's budget had been £65m, whereas London's final budget was £27m, which was twice the original provision. The London stadium had the same number of seats as Beijing's, but was half the size; this intimacy of scale meant that Boyle felt he could achieve something personal and connecting.

The different sections of the ceremony were designed to reflect aspects of British history and culture, with the title Isles of Wonder partly inspired by Shakespeare's play The Tempest (particularly Caliban's 'Be not afeard' speech), and partly by the G. K. Chesterton aphorism: "The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder."

In July 2010, Boyle started brainstorming ideas with designer Mark Tildesley, writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce and costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb. They considered "what was essentially British", with the non-British Larlarb able to offer a view of what the world thought Britain meant. Cottrell-Boyce had given Boyle a copy of Pandaemonium, (named after the capital of Hell in Paradise Lost) by Humphrey Jennings, which collated contemporary reports from the Industrial Revolution. It had become traditional during the opening ceremony to "produce" the Olympic rings in a spectacular manner. Cottrell-Boyce commented: "Danny had a very clear idea that in the first 15 minutes you had to have a great, startling image that could go around the world; it had to climax with something that made people go 'Oh my God! Boyle decided that "the journey from the pastoral to the industrial, ending with the forging of the Olympic rings" would be that image.

The ten distinct chapters on which the team started work were gradually compressed into three principal movements: the violent transition from "Green and Pleasant Land" to the "Pandemonium" of industrial revolution, a salute to the NHS and children's literature, and a celebration of pop culture, technology and the digital revolution.

When Boyle returned to work on the ceremony in the spring of 2011 he asked Rick Smith of Underworld, with whom he had worked on several film projects as well as his theatrical production of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to be the musical director. At the same time the team moved to the Three Mills studio complex in east London, where a 4x4 metre scale model of the stadium was built. For security reasons, a single CGI-assisted version of the ceremony was kept on editor Sascha Dhillon's laptop; anyone needing it had to come to the studio.

The cast included professional performers and 7,500 volunteers. Boyle considered the volunteers to be "the most valuable commodity of all". In November 2011 they auditioned at Three Mills, and rehearsals began in earnest in spring 2012 at an open-air site at Dagenham (the abandoned Ford plant), often in foul weather. Although key contributors had to sign non-disclosure agreements and some elements were codenamed, Boyle placed immense trust in the volunteers by asking them simply to "save the surprise" and not leak any information. Further volunteers were recruited to help with security and marshalling, and to support the technical crew. Three weeks before the ceremony, Mark Rylance, who was to have taken a leading part, pulled out after a family bereavement and was replaced by Kenneth Branagh.

The Olympic Bell, the largest harmonically tuned bell in the world, weighing 23 tonnes, had been cast in brass under the direction of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry by Royal Eijsbouts of the Netherlands, and hung in the Stadium. It was inscribed with a line from Caliban's speech in The Tempest: "Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises".

Boyle gave significant emphasis to the London 2012 theme "inspire a generation" and devised a programme relying heavily on children and young people, and built around themes that would relate to the young. Twenty-five schools in the six original East London host boroughs were used to recruit child volunteers for the performance, and 170 sixth formers (16–18-year-olds), between them speaking more than 50 languages, were recruited from their colleges.

On 12 June 2012, at a press conference, Boyle had promised a huge set of rural Britain, which was to include a village cricket team, farm animals, a model of Glastonbury Tor, as well as a maypole and a rain-producing cloud. His intention was to represent the rural and urban landscape of Britain. The design was to include a mosh pit at each end of the set, one with people celebrating a rock festival and the other the Last Night of the Proms.

Boyle promised a ceremony with which everyone would feel involved; he said, "I hope it will reveal how peculiar and contrary we are – and how there's also, I hope, a warmth about us." Some of the set was designed with real grass turf and soil. The use of animals (40 sheep, 12 horses, 3 cows, 2 goats, 10 chickens, 10 ducks, 9 geese and 3 sheep dogs, looked after by 34 animal handlers) drew some criticism from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Boyle, who was being advised by the RSPCA, assured PETA that the animals would be well cared for. After the press conference, much commentary in the UK Press was negative and attracted "hundreds of comments online completely supporting...the view that the opening ceremony would be a disaster."

The overwhelming majority of the music used was British. The team worked next door to the office of the musical director for the closing ceremony, David Arnold, and so hearing each other's music there was a scramble to claim a particular song first. A.R. Rahman, who worked with Boyle on Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours, composed a Punjabi song "Nimma Nimma" to showcase Indian influence in the UK, according to Boyle's wishes. More Indian music was also scheduled for inclusion in the medley including a Tamil song from the 1989 Bollywood film Ram Lakhan titled "Naanthaan Ungappanda". Paul McCartney was to be the ceremony's closing act.

Sebastian Coe was instrumental in asking the Queen to take part, responding positively when Boyle first pitched the Happy and Glorious film sequence featuring the Queen. Boyle suggested that the Queen be played either by a lookalike, or by a world-class actress such as Helen Mirren, in a location to double as Buckingham Palace. Coe asked Princess Anne, a British member of the IOC and LOCOG, what she thought, and she told him to ask the Queen. Coe presented the idea to the Queen's Deputy Private Secretary. Boyle was surprised to hear that the Queen would be happy to play herself, and wanted a speaking part. Filming took place in late March 2012, and Happy and Glorious was produced by the BBC, as was the opening film sequence Journey along the Thames.

Changes were still being made to the programme in the final days before the ceremony: a BMX bike section was dropped due to time constraints, and the "Pandemonium" and "Thanks..Tim" sections were edited down. In 2016 Boyle recounted how he had come under pressure from Jeremy Hunt, then the Olympics and Culture Secretary, to cut back the NHS section, which he had saved only by threatening to resign and take the volunteers with him.

Two full dress and technical rehearsals took place in the Olympic stadium, on 23 and 25 July, in front of an audience of 60,000 comprising volunteers, cast members' families, competition winners, and others connected to the Games. Boyle asked them not to "spoil the surprise" by using the hashtag #savethesurprise on social media, keeping the performance a secret for the hundreds of millions who would watch on the Friday night.

Officials and guests

Royal Box

Seated in the Royal Box were the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, and other members of the British royal family. They were accompanied by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Prime Minister David Cameron, Spouse of the Prime Minister Samantha Cameron, former Prime Ministers John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Officials of the Olympic movement included President of the IOC Jacques Rogge, LOCOG Chairman Sebastian Coe and members of the IOC.

International dignitaries

The ceremony was the largest gathering of world leaders for an Olympic and sporting event in history, surpassing that of 2008. Three multilateral leaders, more than ninety-five heads of state and government and representatives from five organisations and one hundred and twenty countries attended.

Proceedings

Schedule

Prologue

At exactly 20:12 BST, the Red Arrows performed a flypast over the Olympic Stadium and then over the concert in Hyde Park. This concert featured artists selected to represent the four nations of the United Kingdom: Duran Duran, Stereophonics, Snow Patrol and Paolo Nutini.

At the beginning the stadium contained a rural scene including the model of Glastonbury Tor, a model village and a water wheel, replete with live animals (removed shortly before the ceremony began), and actors portraying working villagers, football and cricket players.

Frank Turner performed three songs ("Sailor's Boots", "Wessex Boy" and "I Still Believe") on the model of Glastonbury Tor, joined by Emily Barker, Ben Marwood and Jim Lockey, as well as his regular backing band the Sleeping Souls. LSO On Track (an orchestra of 80 young musicians from 10 East London boroughs together with 20 LSO members) then performed Edward Elgar's "Nimrod" from the Enigma Variations, accompanied by extracts from the BBC Radio Shipping Forecast, and maritime images on the big screens, while the audience held up blue sheeting to simulate the sight of the ocean. This performance celebrated Britain's maritime heritage and geographical insularity.

Countdown (21:00–21:04 BST)

The ceremony began at 21:00 after a one-minute "60 to 1" countdown film made up of shots of numbers, such as those on house doors, street nameplates, London buses, station platforms and market labels. The number 39 is seen at the foot of a flight of steps, a reference to John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, while the 10 is the door number from 10 Downing Street.

Source and attribution

Adapted from “2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.