Taomist, in the Eastern Time Zone NBC started the closing ceremony at 8:20EDT, interrupted at 11, resumed at midnight. Evidently *in the West *they did otherwise.
Spice Girls got two.
I’ve got to wonder about the Monty Python sketch. I was expecting them to re-write that line to take out “piece of shit.” It seems a little inapproriate to be swearing during an Olympic ceremony.
Also, I’ve got to wonder if they included that skit as a tacit admission that hosting the Olympics is huge, expensive pain in the ass. 
My favorite part, hands down, was the Pet Shop Boys, dressed like…whatever, riding on rickshaws pulled by guys wearing traffic cones. It was so hilariously surreal, I would pay good money to hear the reasoning that went into that bit.
They’re the Pet Shop Boys. That’s the sort of thing they do.
Well I stopped watching before the Spice girls and Monty Python. Did MP dedicate the song to McKayla?
“Newspaper taxis appear on the shore” from the Beatles’ “Lucy
In The Sky With Diamonds.”
Thanks for the reminder. I hadn’t made that association.
Just scanning through the BBC coverage, I see that in addition to Ray Davies and the Kate Bush number being deleted from NBC’s broadcast, they also didn’t show the awarding of the medals to the marathon runners. No Americans, so who cares, right?
They showed very few medal ceremonies at all. NBC really did a very poor job of covering the Olympics.
The official song was that travesty that Muse performed later on. Elbow just sang two of their hits but dragged one of them out hoping they’d finish by the time all the athletes came in…alas they had to resort to re-playing the backing-tape for the previous artists.
The gymnasts are a group called ‘Spellbound’ who ‘Britains got Talent’ two or three years ago
That looked really weird. Usually artists will adjust the mic themselves when it’s at the wrong height like it was here, but maybe he thinks he’s too big to have to do that or maybe there is some union rule in London that artists can’t touch the sound equipment.
Nope, that’s what they did here on the West Coast, too. Ceremony ended at 11:00, new show was on until 11:20, then news, then more Olympics at midnight.
If that’s the case, then I have no idea what he meant by this:
I’m guessing he thought they were broadcasting it live to all the time zones.
i find it a bit daft to start a program at 7pm eastern as nbc did and then not show the entire program.
when they didn’t start the closing ceremony at 7, i went to watching something else, tuning in at 15 minute intervals to see if they were starting. i couldn’t believe they weren’t showing it.
finally about 8:30 they started. an hour and a half later.
unbelievable!!! i was a bit miffed they cut things out i was looking forward to seeing. i turned it off when they went to that show. really?!? splitting up the closing ceremony?!? just daft.
Nah, that’s how he likes to do it, he has always hunched over his microphone. Nothing more than an affectation.
Maybe that’s what they would do in the US, but the whole point of Monty Python is that it’s irreverent, edgy, slightly disrespectful of expected behaviour. There would have been a enormous outcry in the UK if they had bleeped the words or rewritten it. That song, and Monty Python, hold a significant place in our theatrical culture.
Cultural differences, I suppose.
FFS, beyond the actual competitions, the Olympic organisation is a bogus, self-aggrandising pitiless parasite of a franchise jumping from continent to continent preying on taxpayers and innocents.
A bigger bunch of *unts it’s difficult to imagine - “respect” isn’t a word that comes immediately to mind.