One Night in 2012 - An Imagine Special imagine...

-RADIO:

-'OK, guys, I'm with you,

'we're about to go live to the world.'

'Standing by for drummers,

and stand by for cast entering onto the field of play.'

'This is Toby. Good luck, everybody, have a ball.'

It's building, man, it's building. 80,000.

And the rest, the other billion?

-'Standby vom one, please.'

-'Standing by.'

-'Standby vom two.'

-'Standing by.'

-'Vom three.'

-'Standing by.'

-'Vom four.'

-'Standing by.'

'Standby LX cue 610, standby music cue 9.'

'Standby for Pandemonium.'

DRUMS BEAT

'Ken...

'go.'

Be not afear'd.

Be not afear'd.

I can never forget the track, Nimrod by Elgar,

and then we get the cue in the ear.

-CHEERING

-Good luck, good luck!

Whoo!

I couldn't believe I was going to be in the Olympic opening ceremony,

and at times I still can't believe I was in it.

CHANTING

This is it, this is where it's going to happen.

This is where one billion people will be tuning in on the night,

watching us.

We had these balloons walking round,

and it allowed the old cynics to go, "Ha, it's going to be Teletubbies."

Good evening, Mr Bond.

People's expectations were rock bottom, to the day,

and there was no platform for optimism.

'Forgers and smelters, back up.'

'Shake it off if you're getting burnt.'

There's hot embers landing on you,

but nothing would have stopped me being under that Olympic ring.

We knew that Danny, he'd threatened to resign.

It was difficult, but it just created something extraordinary.

It was a love song to the United Kingdom.

I remember getting, like, vertigo, but in amazement.

I thought what I was going to be doing was applauding others,

I thought I was going to be applauding athletes and dignitaries.

I had no idea that we were going to be celebrated,

that there was going to be a sense in which ordinary,

everyday people were going to be applauded.

It made me feel I was in the centre of the universe.

I just think there's something so amazing

about the ordinariness of us,

and the extraordinariness of that opening ceremony.

The city that hosted the Games in 1908 and 1948.

The International Olympic Committee has the honour of announcing

that the Games of the XXX Olympiad in 2012

are awarded to the city of London.

-CHEERING

-We've done it!

Launched and won by a Labour government

at a time of economic optimism,

London 2012 was supposed to be the crowning glory

of an ascendant Britain.

But by the time the Games rolled round,

the country had been plunged into economic crisis.

A Conservative-Democrat coalition had been elected,

and at a time of austerity,

the Olympics seemed a luxury which the nation could ill afford.

But there WERE people who believed, and this is their story.

Being someone who was born and raised in East London,

I can't have the greatest show on Earth come to my doorstep,

literally, and just watch it on TV, you know, so I had to get involved.

'Good afternoon, this is Simon Mayo here on 5 Live.

'Coming up before four o'clock, Danny Boyle,

'director of Slumdog Millionaire,

'Sebastian Coe, chair of the London organising committee

'of the Olympic Games...

-'Afternoon to you, Danny - this is Seb Coe, this is Danny Boyle.'

-'How are you doing?'

You know, life is happenstance,

and it was just one of those odd meetings. I never met Danny.

But we were both on the Simon Mayo show.

'Let's take some travel with Louise.

'And what's frustrating is that Seb and Danny are having a very

'interesting conversation, but they're mouthing it to each other.'

In the middle of the traffic news, he said,

"I live in East London, I have for 25 years -

"I'll do anything to help you."

'I'm pretty excited,

'cos they're taking place about a mile from where I live.

'I live in Mile End, so it's just down the road.'

HE LAUGHS

And I said, "Well, OK, I think we should talk."

'Now, with a little over two years to go,

'London 2012 is planning its Olympic opening ceremony.

'Today, Danny Boyle, the director behind Slumdog Millionaire,

'was put in charge.'

When I heard that it was Danny Boyle

and the people who were involved in Trainspotting,

I definitely wanted to be involved, because I just felt,

this is going to be something really special,

but also possibly a little bit edgy.

-I was a big fan of Danny Boyle.

-Yeah, absolutely, definitely.

-We had to apply separately, didn't we?

-Yeah.

We had to do our own e-mails separately, yeah.

-I'm Jim Bright.

-I'm Catherine Bright.

-I'm Tristan Bright.

-My name is Nadia Gildeh...

-..Gina Watson...

-..Dennis Fernando.

-..John Grant.

-..Claire Cohen...

-..Henry Herrera.

-My name is Jo...

-My name is Craig...

-Martin Jones...

-..Carly Enstone...

-My name is Henry Costa.

-I'm Jasmine Breinburg.

It started in a room very like this.

There you go.

'I had this idea of a room, and there would be a bunch of us meet,

'and so I thought, simultaneously, of a writer,

'which is Frank.

'Frank has enormous intelligence.'

And it was Mark, a designer who I'd worked with a number of times.

We wanted to design a whole world,

so Mark was part of that initial group.

Oh, my God!

We set out to be personal with 10,000 volunteers, so...

I thought, "I need another me,

and who could that be?" and I thought, "It's Paulette."

Paulette.

'I thought, this is not going to work unless we have a producer,'

and that's when I thought of Tracey.

I didn't really know anybody who could do this if Tracey said no.

Adam, especially, helped build

basically a version of the show that we took to everybody

to show them what they were getting involved in.

And then music, Rick's part of the group Underworld,

and I'd first come across their work on Dubnobasswithmyheadman,

which is an amazing album they made,

and actually was the soundtrack of Trainspotting.

MUSIC: Dark and Long (Dark Train) by Underworld

Danny is what I call an ideal collaborator.

I remember being with him in meetings, and I'm telling you,

if you didn't know what he looked like,

you wouldn't know who the director was in that team.

And then, suddenly, of course, he would say one word,

or maybe a few words or a sentence,

and you'd go, "Ah, that must be him."

I live quite near where the planned occasion was,

and when we won the Games,

I remember reading a bit of speculation about who will do

the opening ceremony, who will direct the opening ceremony?

And I saw all these figures mentioned, and I was a bit peeved,

I was like, "Oh, they should ask me, I live nearby as well!

"I could do that!"

And then I got this message saying, would I meet Marty Green,

the head of ceremonies, and I met him and I said,

"Yeah, I'll do that,"

and then I met Seb, who's got to make the big decision, you know, who's he going to entrust with this?

Do you think, let me ask you, do you think they thought to themselves,

"Well, the last big thing we did was the Millennium,"

and it was ruled by committee and it was problematic,

so here, they obviously were thinking of something else.

Slumdog had just come out.

Yes, which had been a hit.

There's huge advantages to appointing somebody like that

to make it, who's had a hit.

The downside is they might be difficult, you know,

they might not be manipulable.

But is it also like having an authorial voice

-in a way that the Games hadn't?

-I don't know.

We were coming after China, obviously.

DRUMMING

And that had an authorial voice in the sense of a military economy.

The British public were very nervous at the idea

of Britain hosting the Olympics.

There was this idea around that nobody could hope to better Beijing.

RHYTHMIC DRUMMING

CHEERING

Britain decries itself too much - that's one of the problems.

I mean, one of the things that they said was we'll never beat Beijing.

Well, why would we want to beat Beijing?

So you're following that, and of course,

Beijing had been extraordinary, and it was one of the reasons everybody said,

"You're insane, doing this, you'll fail."

Because Beijing was just unfollowable,

-and that was exactly why we did it, I think.

-Yeah.

You thought, exactly, it is unfollowable,

and it's released everybody.

It's very beautiful.

'And ours was always going to be more idiosyncratic than that.'

Part of my job was just to put

inspiring quotations or images up on the wall,

and one of them was a great line from GK Chesterton -

"The world is not perishing for lack of wonders -

"the world is perishing for lack of wonder,"

and that your job is to,

kind of, alert people to what is amazing.

Another word we had was "belief," really.

We wanted to create something that people could believe in,

and belief, you can see -

especially when you have a coalition government -

belief is absent, generally.

-The year before, there were riots across the country.

-Yeah.

'This is a public order warning.

'Will all members of the public please disperse.'

London was just in an absolute mess.

Finances were bad.

There were racial problems.

Everybody was really miserable.

Maybe I speak on behalf of a lot of Londoners when I say

I was a bit sceptical about the whole thing.

'Things have gone so wrong with 2012's security plans.'

You did get a lot of people saying, "Well, I'm not staying around for the Olympics,

"it's going to be rubbish, like everything else."

'The 150-day countdown has begun.'

I wouldn't say I was overconfident,

but we're going to do our very, very best.

People were quite, you know, pessimistic

about the Olympics in general.

People's expectations were rock bottom to the day that it happened,

but despite all the irony and the sneering and the cynicism,

there was this big body of people who wanted things to be better.

There was an announcement on the radio in January,

and it was Sebastian Coe saying, "We haven't got enough men."

'You know, the difference again between good and great Games

'is often the quality of those volunteers.

'We have a website - get onto that, put your name down.'

I went to the pub that night, when I heard the announcement,

and told the guys in the pub that I was going to apply,

and they all just laughed and said, you know,

"You're too old, you can't move,

"and it's going to be rubbish, anyway.

"And you're not going to get paid, we don't know why you're doing it."

I said, "Well, because it's going to be great."

One of the things you learn very quickly

is you need what's called a pre-vis.

There are so many people you're going to have to persuade,

you know, deflect,

whatever it is you've got to do to these people,

be they money people, be they artists you want to appear,

people you want to reassure...

So we built this pre-vis...

..which was basically a version of the show that we took

to everybody to show them what they were getting involved in.

So that you could say to JK Rowling,

"This is what you're going to be involved in,"

and she could see what was planned.

Cos for most people, it's like,

they were carrying that cynicism that was around -

everyone was saying...

-So how early on did you do this?

-Right from the get-go.

So we all gathered round this table and began discussing ideas,

and then gradually evolved a scenario.

GEESE CHATTER

COWS MOO

We wanted to come from the land into the...

-The green and pleasant land.

-Yeah.

SHEEP BLEAT

It's the green and pleasant land.

We're told these are real clouds

that are going to be delivering real rain.

-We had appalling pre-press.

-Yeah.

It allowed those cynics to go, "Ha, it's going to be Teletubbies!"

-That's what they said, isn't it?

-Yeah, "This is a disgrace!"

LAUGHTER

And of course, it's like...

You can't get worn down by this cynicism that was around.

And the ground that the Olympic Stadium was built on, of course,

was recovered ground -

it had been detoxified from the Industrial Revolution.

But you start way back, when it was a land for sheep.

And then it was really the Industrial Revolution.

We discussed, and we thought, this figure, Brunel -

especially in terms of the industrial landscape -

he's like a figurehead, really.

He also has this extraordinary physicality.

We know that image of him, in front of the chains,

or in front of the bridges that he built,

with the stovepipe hat on, you know?

And then, you think, what is our role?

Post-Empire, built on the Industrial Revolution,

what is it after that?

And you go, we've built a National Health Service.

-Looking after people.

-As a nation...

-Yeah.

..we're going to look after these people,

and that's linked to the sacrifice in the Second World War.

And the other thing we've done is created music.

# There's a starman waiting in the sky... #

The way pop music has forged our identity, really.

If you want to talk about what we have contributed to the world,

-that music... Phew.

-Yeah.

# Is this the real life... #

-and through the digital...

-Digital revolution.

The digital revolution.

# Is this just fantasy... #

So it's our story.

It felt like our job was to represent everybody,

-and that was done through the volunteers.

-Yes.

The audition was at 3 Mills Studios in Bromley by Bow.

I turned up at nine o'clock, there was a very long queue of people,

and there were people of all ages, shapes and sizes,

so it wasn't like they were just looking for one type of person,

which was really nice.

-BIG BAND MUSIC PLAYS

-Here we go...

It was about three hours of just dancing, literally -

the music started, I think Temujin and Sunanda, the two dance coaches,

were there - they sort of just got us moving,

and it wasn't really about being a professional dancer -

it was more about just having a good time.

OK!

Temujin Gill and Sunanda Biswas were not your, kind of,

regular choreographers who you expect to be doing West End shows.

They were like community choreographers.

What better people could you get?

You got the call in the first place, didn't you?

I got the call from Danny in my kitchen,

and I thought, "Let's not get too excited, let's play it cool."

Then he called me, and was like, "Argh!"

THEY LAUGH

BIG BAND MUSIC PLAYS

You had to keep time, you had to keep your spacing.

One more time!

Several times, I lost my place, as did others.

And what I did was just hope nobody noticed,

and I joined in again as soon as I could, and I tried to cover up.

Looking back, I think that's one of the things

they were looking for - people who could carry on.

Let's do it again, here we go.

The first auditions were amazing.

For me, it was like a free dance class, I guess,

so I was just having fun.

Whoo! Come on! Here we go!

They were really revving people up and saying,

"Think of it like a party, and you have to clap in time."

You kind of get into the party vibe.

And then you'd see people standing around

in hi-vis vests with clipboards.

It was perhaps one of the most surreal experiences

of my entire life.

We're not going to do the scary one,

we're going to do the inquisitive one.

It was really like drama school exercises.

I've never been to drama school, but we learned a little routine.

The choreographer was a man called Toby Sedgwick,

and he had done the choreography for War Horse.

It's the first time I'd worked with volunteers,

and it was quite a challenge.

We auditioned 250 people every night for something like two weeks,

specifically for the Industrial Revolution.

I'd split the 250 into groups of 50,

and they'd go through various sequences,

and then I would go round trying to guess.

I'd just look, literally, at backs of all the numbers,

and just go, "347, 392, 457,"

and then count up how many I'd got that day.

Five, six, seven, and,

pull, tap-tap, pull, tap-tap,

pull, tap, tap-tap.

'I had no idea what to expect from the auditions, to be honest,

but they got us to do all sorts.

We didn't know what they were looking for, but they did.

Cos the last thing you want is someone that can't dance,

someone that can't take directions,

and someone that can't take feedback.

That does not help.

Tap, tap, move...

So in our third sequence, which is our music sequence,

I heard about this guy, Kenrick Sandy, he ran this dance workshop.

He is unremitting.

He will not allow anything through, nothing!

He's just brutal with you, and they love it!

CHANTING AND RAPPING

'I am a taskmaster, definitely.'

I'm about creating warriors, I will create soldiers.

I'm not about creating civilians.

We do that every single day in our lives.

When are we actually going to say to ourselves,

"I want to be a superhero"?

The e-mail said,

"Dear John, you have been invited to be a performer

"in the Olympic Games." I hit the roof.

I was absolutely elated.

I just jumped through the roof.

My husband thought we'd won the lottery.

He thought, what the hell's going on,

and I'm screaming, "I'm in, I'm in!"

And he was just like, "Stupid woman."

I remember stressing that we were going to find a great double.

I was a film director,

I was going to cast an actor who looked the absolute spit of her,

so it would be respectful, it wouldn't be, you know...

And I remember us thinking,

that'll be the thing, that's why they'd turn it down,

and why we'll have to do her arriving on the Tube

as the way of bringing the head of state in.

And then we got this message back, not only did they want to do it....

Well, do you remember, I went to that meeting, and I said to Danny,

"You don't need to come because we're just going to talk logistics about...

"I don't know, trying to land a helicopter at Buckingham Palace,"

and Danny said, "Well, shall I come?"

I was like, "No, no - I'll take the aerial team, this is going to be really dull."

Anyway, went to this meeting...

..and we arrived at the meeting...

I remember the Duchy of Cornwall biscuits, as well,

and it was all very nice, and, so I said,

-"Well, we should talk about locations for Buckingham Palace..."

-That's right.

"..Danny will talk to you about a double."

And all of a sudden, they said,

"No, no, of course you don't need to find anywhere else -

"the Queen isn't going to go to another location." Of course, I was like...

How's that going to work?!

LAUGHTER

-Cos as far as I remember, we had the Queen before we had James Bond.

-I think so, yeah.

Mr Bond, Your Majesty.

Frank wrote it up as a script based on Mark's idea,

-but there was no dialogue in it originally.

-No.

And then she said, "I should say something."

-I...

-LAUGHTER

I can't believe she built her part!

LAUGHTER

Good evening, Mr Bond.

And there's a great expression, actually,

on Daniel Craig's face as she walks past him.

And he is brilliant, because he plays that thing of,

"Well, I'm a fictional character..."

Good evening, Your Majesty.

"..and that's the real Queen walking past me. How does that work?

-"I don't know!" And off he goes.

-LAUGHTER

And it is a, kind of, brilliant bit of meta-acting.

HE LAUGHS

-And they afforded us amazing access.

-They did, yeah.

OK, so, action, when you're ready, Kai.

We worked with her corgis,

cos we thought we'd have to bring corgis in.

WHISTLING

-Bunny!

-Bunny, bunny!

So we had to do the corgis running up the stairs.

But one of the problems was, the scheduling of it,

was that they have to have corgi tea with the Queen, so...

-LAUGHTER

-That's right, isn't it?

-The corgi unit was shooting.

The guy went, "Stop now, we've got to go."

"No, Adam and I are in the middle of setting up a shot for this."

-Steady.

-And we're rolling.

-And action, Kai.

-Steady.

If any of it had leaked,

the sequence would never have been part of the ceremony,

because it was like the great surprise,

one of the great surprises.

But it did sort of leak.

It did sort of leak.

They printed this story, they'd seen Daniel Craig,

or somebody like Daniel Craig, going into the palace...

in a taxi.

And it was like, "What is this?!"

And in fact, it was printed on April 1st,

so everybody dismissed it as an April Fool's story that papers run.

The one time in its entire history that the Sun told the truth,

-and nobody believed it!

-LAUGHTER

We then moved to Dagenham, end of April, beginning of May.

They took us on a bus to the actual site, at an old Ford plant.

I don't think I really imagined the scale

of what we were going to see when we got there.

Oh, my God, that's when it definitely got real,

because then you can see the magnitude of this operation.

-LOUDSPEAKER:

-'Left, right, left...'

Here we are in Dagenham!

It was an enormous site,

and in the middle was this enormous circus tent,

which we assumed was where we'd be rehearsing,

but actually, that was just for us to put our bags in.

This is the tent, here.

And they've got two, like, arenas outside,

the size of the stadium, basically.

And we are practising in FOP 2 today, and I'm on Vom 2.

And they're practising over here - we're on a break at the moment.

And they're just practising over there.

535 is down the ramp and just to the left-hand side.

GARBLED LOUDSPEAKER

8,000-plus people there - "I see how you're going to use the space!"

HE CHUCKLES

It started to piece itself together a bit.

-LOUDSPEAKER:

-Can you all hear me?

-THEY CHEER

RHYTHMIC DRUMMING

So that they didn't get their own clothes wet,

all the volunteers were given green boiler suits.

I'll never forget, it really did look like North Korea.

And we put the music on, and you'd hear this...

Dum-da-da-dum-da-da...

This rhythm, just incredible.

All doing this choreography, and it just really looked like North Korea.

From very early on, we all felt excited to be part of something

so much bigger than us.

"EYE OF THE TIGER" PLAYS

THEY CHEER

It was very open to the elements,

and it was either baking hot, or...

The rain!

It just rained and rained and rained at Dagenham.

Poor buggers in that rain.

That grass is so damp.

I think it rained the whole time.

We were outside in the rain,

pretending we were in a beautiful green and pleasant land -

we were actually in a car park in Dagenham.

Just awful.

-VOICE ON FILM:

-Mark time, mark time!

Mark time if they're standing still, mark time.

That's the first chimney up.

First chimney up.

INDISTINCT SHOUT

-Could be.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-Easy.

And it was really quite demanding,

trying to follow instructions for hours.

I mean, the worst bit was taking everything off the stage,

and people saying, "Well done, that was very good.

"Now put it all back on again and we'll do it again."

Come on, go on, let them go, let them go!

Let them flow.

Stopping them, that's nonsense.

It felt like being a kid again, like, in a playground,

because there was lots of waiting.

That's the worst area, look, you can see it, you know,

because they're waiting, with it already arrived.

There were some of the days I did think,

"Am I going to get to the 27th?"

If I was honest, I thought maybe I wasn't.

But as I got further into that journey,

it was more and more people to let down if I was to pull out.

That's amazing.

-All of that, yeah, yeah.

-When they're offstage like that, they're doing that, look.

-Yeah, yeah.

Look at that, it's amazing.

But that's nice.

When the Brunels splay out like that.

Those that got it absolutely perfectly...

..I would cast them as a Brunel.

That's better, that's brilliant.

I wanted an elite group.

They weren't the workers, they were the Industrial Revolution,

the signs of it.

And they had to be really hot on the choreography.

I'd work very simple sequences,

so they would learn one sequence, like "lever handle."

Movements have emotional qualities to them.

You explain a lot, you essentialise about what the feeling is.

Like, I had a door press, which would go, "Ker-tsssh."

So all the movements had very mechanical sort of gestures.

one, two, three, four, one, and...boom.

Toby was great.

I think he was responsible for giving us our character.

He was definitely, you know...

"When you hit the moves, you've got to hit them very precise."

Just for the hell of it, make the movements a bit more precise.

Just bit tighter.

That's it, that's it, yeah, it makes a difference.

'They were fantastic to work with, and they were so keen.

'At the end of the evening, I'd say, "OK, go home, and while you're making an omelette in the kitchen,'

"go through all the sequences, just keep going through them all -

"in the bath, wherever you are, just keep doing the sequences."

RHYTHMIC MUSIC PLAYS

'And they'd come back the next week, and I'd say,

' "OK, let's do Chisel Hammer," and they all had it.'

You'd see 150 people all doing that, and you'd go, "Brilliant!"

One, two, three, four.

Great, great, brilliant!

OK, let's go back.

You will not be rehearsing outside.

CHEERING

The rehearsals were hard to some extent.

They were long, and it was cold, but I think they kept the morale up.

There was a lot of joking and laughing -

it was quite good for bonding.

-Five, six, seven, and a...

-FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

You've got to build up their language

and their confidence in themselves, in each other,

their joy of what they're doing.

And when you do that, and you get that right,

you can take anyone anywhere.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

So, Rick, tell us about... The drumming, obviously, was a...

Oh!

One of the first things Danny spoke about to me

was this particular sequence, the Industrial Revolution sequence.

He wanted 1,000 drummers.

We're actors that play the drums,

so I want a bit of attitude,

bit of swagger.

We suddenly needed drums, and it had never honestly occurred to me,

that, hang on, there's 1,000 of them,

if it's £200 a pop, that's £2 million worth of drums.

You know, this isn't going to happen.

I remember them saying how expensive real drums were,

and therefore we could only have 50 of them.

-I think it was 50.

-It was literally...

-The drum budget...

-And you thought, that's not the point.

Then Danny turned round and went,

"Give them buckets."

As a drummer, I've got to say,

I was expecting a drum, but...

DRUMBEAT

Anything that's got a hard surface is a drum, as a drummer.

-DRUMBEAT

-Excellent.

Everything was relating to a size of bucket.

We need big drums - dustbins -

and a stick with a tennis ball on the end, let's try that,

and the props department were amazing.

Rick has this phrase about music,

that it's the liquid architecture around our lives,

and for those people,

it was the throbbing architecture around their involvement

in this show, really, and it wasn't just about then drumming -

they were incredible, those rehearsals,

and he should talk about how you teach people to drum who can't drum.

Cos they turn up and they can't drum,

"I can't drum! I can't drum. I can go like that."

But to do anything more...

And the way they teach them that is incredible.

RHYTHMIC DRUMMING

Tell me about Paul, because Paul clearly was the expertise,

Now, how did Paul react?

Paul Clarvis is an incredible percussionist,

British percussionist.

RHYTHMIC DRUMMING

From his experience of rhythm, he said,

"They can do this, they can do this, they can do this - don't worry.

"Just say what you want to do, yeah, they'll be able to do that."

RHYTHMIC DRUMMING

It's really important when you're playing an instrument,

your body works in a way that works with the instrument.

This is my instrument - I'm going to get the best possible sound I can from it.

When I pull this stick down, this stick goes up,

so you start to use your body.

This is going to be the biggest drum choir in the world,

so we're working together as a team.

'I don't think it is a science, drumming.

'I think that if you can just play a beat

'that makes somebody want to tap their feet...'

One, two, three, four...

'If everything's happening, and the beat's good

'and you can tap your feet, you don't need to do anything else.

'All you've got to do is make people want to tap their feet as a drummer.'

RHYTHMIC STAMPING AND CLAPPING

'I've always believed,'

if you can say it, you can play it.

And something that they all learned to say was,

-IN RHYTHM:

-"Play the drum so your mum can see you on TV,

"play the drum so your mum can see you on TV,"

a nice...

PLAYS RHYTHM

We were taught that phonetically,

we were taught in our heads to say...

-RHYTHMICALLY:

-Play the drums so your mum can see you on TV.

Play the drums so your mum can see you on TV.

We teach people and if they have problems with that we say,

we will move by putting it into smart chunks.

Play the drum.

Keep going!

'It's 250 people doing that.'

Sing it in your head.

'And then when everyone's got that, then we take it a bit further.'

Work together as a team.

One, two, three, four!

'Before they know it, after maybe half an hour,

'after maybe 20 minutes, after maybe an hour,

'play the drums so your mum can see you on TV.'

So the first thing was the movement and understanding the words.

The second thing was the drumming in relationship to your instrument...

and then the last thing was working out the music.

OK, now listen to the instructions.

We are going to do some movement.

It might not have been sense or common to me,

but Paul brought these simple ideas which when we demonstrated them

with the drum captains and myself just worked so brilliantly.

One, two, three, four.

Oh, yes!

You go back to these people a few days later

and they are beating out this rhythm, how are they doing that?

-What is the other one?

-I-am-in-need-of-a-drink.

-Yes!

This is a mass movement, this extraordinary thing that

happened in our lives and we lead the world in, this Industrial Revolution,

and we wanted literally make it visceral and you feel it.

It was the people who were creating in front of them the Industrial Revolution.

It was their music as well

and you could feel this was their soundtrack, their heartbeat.

The journey, the discovery was, oh, my goodness, this sound is astonishing.

Hearing 1,000 people go...

It remained as groups playing afterwards in after events,

including one of them sadly died, passed away and they turned up

at the funeral and played banging the drum so your mum can see one TV.

And stuff like that. It is so emotional.

All SOS cast on this channel come on, guys, let's go. Let's go.

And the headphones guys, the back of your neck and under your ears, OK?

I have just been told we've got four FM channels, right?

The other thing that happened when we went to Dagenham was the in-ears.

Every time it improves, just continue that.

It was brilliant because they had this big tower as well.

Sometimes you would climb the tower...

-Yeah, I'm scared of heights...

-Looking down on this...

Let's go, let's go, let's go. Come on, come on, guys.

All the beds were there by that time.

We called the running track the M25 so you have the M25

and then the field of play was the middle section.

A little bit quicker, guys, if it's safe to do so,

that would be fantastic.

-VOLUNTEER 1:

-I was one of the nurses that went around the M25.

-VOLUNTEER 2:

-My bed was in the G of G-O-S-H.

We had a big double bed with a trampoline on it which

we had children doing some trampolining.

OK, persevering. Persevering.

When we parked up the beds, then the dancing began.

Dancers standing by for moving back into position.

And go, M25. Well done, fantastic.

Honestly, incredible.

My goodness, we are going to conquer in the stadium on Tuesday.

My name is Hamish and I am a live multi-camera television director.

The pre-vis, I watched it and was like, "Oh, man. I'm in trouble!

"I'm in big trouble here."

Here you have a Hollywood, Oscar-winning movie director

creating this pre-vis and a lot of the shots just weren't possible.

It inspired me. It scared me.

And it also said to me,

"Right, we have to approach the television filming of this

"in a completely different way to any previous Olympics ceremony."

Keep going, keep going and stop!

I can remember the first day we all went to the stadium

and until that time I had not really been intimidated but then

when we stood in there, I got a great picture of Danny

literally looking into the space and thinking, "Oh, my God!"

"It's huge." The space was ginormous.

And also because it was such a big playing field, scale was important.

He had to make events happen in different sections

because the audience couldn't really take in everything.

So we had to have multiples - each quadrant,

each corner had to have something going on.

PATRICK WOODROFFE: Pixels are something people had been trying to do for a long time.

It was nice as a little effect

but you could never have the power to make these things strong

because the assumption was you could never wire up a whole stadium.

And I think it was Danny's naivete that allowed us

to make this thing happen because he said,

well, as any great film director would say, "Wire the stadium!"

So suddenly we had the possibility we could put

a background in every single shot from wherever it came.

The whole place looked like a building site

and if you are lighting a building site in the pouring rain with

people wearing plastic Macintoshes, it never looks any good.

So I started to have a lot of doubts.

And some nights I would think,

"This could be the best work I ever made in my career"

and the next night I could think, "This could be like a big disaster

"and I could be responsible in large part for some of it!"

Eventually we moved to the stadium and that was a lot cooler.

It was just amazing to see how it was really coming together.

If memory is correct,

it was 22nd May 2012 and I have never seen anything like it.

It was just awesome because you think, "Oh, my God.

"This is where it will happen.

"This is where one billion people will be tuning in on the night watching us!"

Coming down!

Thing that inspired me and scared me

was actually the level of detail that Danny wanted to go to.

If you watch his films, they are a visceral experience

and these events are not usually visceral.

They are usually pageantry, they have scale,

they have lots of big statements and Danny wasn't talking like that.

Danny was talking about getting right in there.

Go straight to VT, Pyramix roll, should be auto fire on EVS.

On the night, I am sat in a room, I have 40 views on this show,

how do I make sure all my cameras are in exactly the right place

for exactly the right moment and how do I get to the massive detail?

We took the decision really early on that if we really want to

get to the emotion of this, if we really want to get to the

heart of this, and if we really want to get to the Danny detail

of this, then we need to be embedded as a production side-by-side.

Pre-roll on this one.

So, we literally embedded cameras in with the volunteers from weeks out.

OK, stand by.

One of the most extraordinary days we had was the first

time that we saw each other's sequences.

We got them to sit in the auditorium

and you could feel they thought that sequence was amazing.

And therefore it made them feel...

Maybe their sequence was going to be all right as well

because that one was all right, the same kind of people.

Also, what it did was make them go, "I've so made the right decision."

So I'm going to keep going with this because it gets better and better.

Let her play, let her play, let her play. Stand by 10. 10, go.

Push 10.

We started to do dress rehearsals, they allowed us

to watch the other sections and that basically the started excitement up.

All of a sudden, the pandemonium drummers started up behind us

and they started the Industrial Revolution sequence

and we didn't know anything about it.

My jaw just dropped.

Give me some grass, 13. Give me the grass being pulled up.

I need stuff getting taken off. Stand by 12. 12, take.

Stand by, four.

And four, take.

The magnitude of the event just kicks in a bit more

because we can see the end of the tunnel now and we can see the set.

We can see the set, the green and pleasant land, oh, my God, that is real grass. Ha-ha!

You know, before we wasn't pulling real grass

because up until that point it was a case of raise the chimneys with nothing quite to raise.

And then we saw the chimneys, oh, my God, that is so clever. Oh, my God.

They are so tall, like, wow!

I don't really want to see technicians doing that.

Drain it out. Don't offer me shots like that.

The chimneys rising.

One of the wonders we wanted to have happen was for everything

to appear from the ground so we'd drawn up these 50 foot chimneys...

At the time I thought we will be able to dig into the ground

because that's what people do at the Olympics,

they excavate huge holes. And then we got there course we had already had the turf laid

for the track and field so you couldn't touch that.

How are we going to get these chimneys up?

We have six or seven feet underneath the stage

and then a Dutch inflatable company said, "We can do this with air."

We were going, "That is not going to work."

The trick they did was attach a wire to the top,

they forced it up like you would force up an inflatable dinghy

but at the same time they held the pressure down so it kept it straight.

To this day, I think

some of the people still think we had 40 foot holes in the ground.

There was lots of inventive people involved in making that happen.

One of the amazing things for me was how crazy,

dreamy and visionary engineers are.

Creative people come in and say, "I do this."

But engineers were coming and going,

"I can make water that speaks..." or, you know, what?!

They would say, "I have never been given the chance to

"but I want to do this bizarre, unthinkable thing."

Well, you have had that bottled up inside you waiting for us

to ask, you know!

In Dagenham we were rehearsing on the flat,

it was something of a surprise when we got into the stadium to

discover we had to push the beds up ramps to get onto the field of play.

Remember you have the ramp to contend with.

I know you have only done this once.

Give it that bit of oomph beforehand but please make sure you are safe.

I think everybody understood that the selection of the artistic

director was a high-risk decision.

You know, the other thing that was important was to keep people

out of the way.

And my early meetings with the Treasury,

they wanted to fiddle and micromanage everything.

This is what I was told rather than what I was present at

but I know that the new Secretary of State for instance wanted to be very

hands-on in the artistic content

and I think that was quite a tense time.

And Danny was absolutely clear this was his show.

We did have some stand-offs.

There were some moments, some big moments, yeah.

The forces wanted us to cut one of the sequences,

the NHS sequences.

They wanted us to reduce that or cut it

or make them just walk around the stadium.

At one point Danny Boyle talked to us and said

that our section had been under threat.

When he said he might have to cut the section everybody was

obviously very upset and I did think at the time I have been here

for how many rehearsals, we have only got a few left,

I would have been devastated if he'd cut us, to be honest.

That was against the very nature of what

we had built from the beginning.

It wasn't about a particular sequence,

it was about all the volunteers and if you make these

kind of statements and make this inclusive action of involving

people in the process, you're not going to them at cut the end.

And that was very important to us

and so you have to put your foot down.

Danny Boyle decided if they cut our section,

he was going to take all the volunteers, not just our section,

the Pandemonium Drummers, everybody, and he was going to walk off.

He would have known that this was not just a dancing gig for us,

this was us presenting to the world what we stand for.

The NHS sequence of course was a magical sequence both in design

terms and the sense these are people who are genuinely these people.

They were recruited from the NHS.

Light up, M. M, light up.

People had come off the night shift and turned up. It transformed me.

You can see them looking at you because you're somebody who is known

or they have seen your films or something, they are expecting me to transform them.

It wasn't like that. It was they who transformed us

because by that time we were saturated having dealt with

the politics of the Olympics and then all these people started

turning up and they had this look in there eye and it is,

you could exploit it, which you do to a degree, but you can feed off it as well.

And it kind of nurtured us through it.

Everybody who had worked as a volunteer in it,

their work was in the show.

Stephen, welcome.

We are talking politics.

Obviously, Stephen, you are the executive producer,

did you find there were pressures and how did you deal with them?

Divergence of taste, perhaps,

one could call it, would be the polite way of talking about it.

Jeremy Hunt, and he wound up the Prime Minister to a certain extent,

were very concerned with Britain's role in defeating fascism.

Because it was like, where is the war?

We won the war, we beat the fascists, where's the war?

And that sort of went to the wire, really.

In the end, Danny and I had to go without Jeremy Hunt to see

the Prime Minister and just explain it wasn't going to happen

and in the end I thought David Cameron did say,

"It's your ceremony, it's fine," is what he said in the meeting.

He did, yes.

A spokesman for Jeremy Hunt said, "Jeremy rejects suggestions he was

"anything other than a huge fan of the entire Opening Ceremony.

"In fact, he personally authorised

"an additional £40 million to fund it.

"His only concern in the planning was the length of the show

"because of the need to be sure everyone could get home safely.

"Jeremy thought it was a superb spectacle."

And the biggest political battle we had of the whole games was to film it ourselves.

And from the darkness came the sound of the tubular bells.

Because normally it is filmed by OBS and these are sports cameramen

who come in and place their cameras where they're going to be for the games

and then they happen to film the ceremony as it

walks around the stadium which is why

they like it to walk around so they can film it with those cameras.

And we said from the beginning, "No, we are going to film this ourselves

"because, in a modern digital age,"

and that is what we were celebrating, "You have to have

"a sophisticated visual vocabulary through which you are presenting your material."

So, we get to the stadium and we get the opportunity to

stay behind after our section had rehearsed

and we start to see other segments and, to be honest, it was like, what the hell? Ha-ha!

Like, what is this?!

We have kids jumping on beds, we have the NHS and Mary Poppins

and it didn't make sense at first.

And it was like, is this a mishmash of stuff that is British?

And, as I am peering over, seeing moving beds on the scene

and that stuff, I get a tap on the shoulder and there,

to my right, is Danny and he is like, "What do you think?"

I'm like,

"Oh, OK. It looks good!"

What am I going to say to Danny Boyle?

Whoohoo!

Massive hands up, turn to your nearest audience, hands up,

take a well-deserved bow, guys.

Thanking you, 30 years in the business, thank you very much!

-Goodbye, nurses. See you Monday.

-Bye!

Everyone was there, that's what I can't believe.

Every single rehearsal, everyone was there.

Everyone, you had to be putting in full effort at all times.

It was a lot of time and energy.

In our third sequence, which is our music sequence, we thought

we will draw from the volunteers this family who live in the house.

And whose daughter goes out into the town on the night

and meets this boy and there's a romance and the classic tale

is told through music as they head out into the town.

And they would normally be professional dancers

but we drew them from the volunteers.

Did you imbue them with the storytelling?

Yes, and I think the feeling we all had for them

and we went and talked to them kind of makes them feel they are serious

about this, they want this to be our show and therefore they respond.

Because everyone was a volunteer, because everyone was

so down to earth and they had a passion for being there,

people would go home and practice, people wanted to be there.

Nice, Jas. Nice, Henry. Keep that chest up, man.

We needed to push our volunteers knowing that some of them

have never danced before to a level where they are so comfortable

that when a camera is in their face, they're still in character.

-When the music plays, they have that composure.

-Nice, smile, Jas.

Keep it going.

They defined the show

because our instinct was the show was about them, about the nation.

How incredible. Congratulations, guys.

It was about Saturday night and boy meets girl on a Saturday night,

they felt this was their story and this was their show.

Cheese! One, two, three.

They had the costume designer Suttirat Larlarb

literally sewing their clothes on them.

What Suttirat did was made those individual volunteers

feel special, like this was their show.

It was an incredibly arduous process.

There were approximately 9,000 volunteer performers

with about six component parts per costume on average.

Around 54, 60,000 pieces of clothing.

So, these are all the dresses.

Hello, we are in the casting holding area.

The Thanks, Tim section, we wanted to make sure to include also not just the

great music at the time but also the great fashion coming at the time.

Lucy! She's outside.

We wanted to represent each of the decades so for instance in the

'60s we had Bridget Riley and Op art

and in the '70s we have Mark Bolan and David Bowie and in the

'80s was Frankie Goes To Hollywood

and the '90s was rave culture.

And of course it has to be for television spectacular so there is

elements of light incorporated into all those costumes.

So in the Bridget Riley '60s section we had giant conical dresses

that lit up.

Each of those volunteers had a costume they felt,

"I am a movie star. I am a movie star."

Suttirat killed herself doing that.

She didn't speak to me for six months after it finished.

She's a personal friend, she wouldn't speak to me

because we'd nearly ended her life!

-Danny, are you all right if we lose the...?

-Yes, absolutely.

Also, if we want to do...

We were so tired towards the end.

There was a lot of sleeping on the hospital beds, almost NHS beds

and I remember sitting in a meeting once,

somebody else was talking and Danny was leaning on the desk looking

at his papers and I looked at him

and realised he was fast asleep!

And I have a great photograph, fast asleep at the table.

What sort of shot do you want? Just sheep moving about?

Jill? Just moving around in the field, lovely.

Come on, come on!

Beautiful one that, guys.

I felt sick the first time I drove in the stadium.

I was really nervous.

It was a brand-new Mini and it was really powerful

and they used to call the track the M25.

So you would hear on comms, "Can we clear the M25,

"the Mini is coming out."

We rise slowly and at some point in the music...

-Oh, wow.

-Michael Jackson's Thriller.

-It is like that.

I think we all certainly felt that our role, as small as it was,

-was crucial.

-We are loving this. You've done a great job.

Absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much.

I am so excited about what the show will look like.

You were part of something bigger than yourself.

There was that sense this was really something very,

very important, not just for me or my family but for the nation.

BORIS JOHNSON: I have never seen anything like this in my life.

Are we ready?

Are we ready? Yes, we are!

The venues are ready, the stadium is ready,

the aquatic centre is ready, the velodrome is ready.

The security is ready, the police are ready...

I remember the night before, we were all really nervous

so we had to have a drink in the bar to calm our nerves.

And a few Pimms and lemonade.

JOHNSON: Are we worried about the weather,

we're not worried about the weather!

-Our main worry for the ceremony was if it did rain.

-And then it rained.

I thought, what is this going to look like?

We're going to open the Olympics with everyone falling over.

For me, I was most fixated on the car not starting or

-halfway around conking out.

-Anything can go wrong.

Whatever you do on that day will be etched in history.

I don't think I slept that well!

I couldn't sleep.

I was wondering if I was going to fail,

if I would fall while running around the stadium, if anything could have happened.

I was worried that the next day might be all of our faces

with like, you know, when you go to jail,

the mugshots being like, "These people ruined England or something."

And again please.

Number one. It's crackling, apparently.

Going into it, I was certainly nervous.

Because, ultimately, if something had gone wrong or something had

not happened, I am the guy that has to say, "Cut to black!"

Three, two, one. Go.

I didn't want that on my head. But, yeah...

OK. This is it. This is D-Day, or whatever you want to call it.

This is, Um... I am feeling a bit emotional.

It's the Opening Ceremony today.

-REPORTER:

-In just a matter of hours,

the eyes of the world will turn to the stadium.

This is the big day.

I can see inside, how exciting. It's all happening.

Hello! Are you all right?

If you can scan the badge for me...

July 27th!

SCREAMING

We are performing in a few hours in there!

Keep the concentration going, really good. Well done.

APPLAUSE

CHANTING: Toby, Toby, Toby!

I think I was very nervous.

I arrived early in the morning and just walked around the green

and pleasant land and that was quite calming, actually.

Late. Late.

Tonight, it's what we've been working for, OK.

So soak up the moment and I promise you this will be stuff you

will remember for the rest of your life.

This is what this country is all about.

It is about you lot and you have done yourself really proud.

Go out, have a great night. Well done.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Come on, keep going. Practice.

-How are you feeling about this situation?

-So excited.

-How excited?

SHE SQUEAKS

Looking smart. Kind of.

There was a huge buzz as everybody got themselves ready.

No gruel for weeks!

Not only the nurses, we were fraternising

and talking with the Industrial Revolution cast,

Green And Pleasant Land cast and the Thanks, Tim cast.

Everyone was taking photos with everyone else.

And the whole thing felt really like a fiesta.

# ..to treat me like you do! Na-na-na-na..! #

Everybody shovel pickaxe.

I am living the dream!

I am way above the hills!

-I am making history.

-You are.

Imagine, my name is in the book!

REPORTER: It is called the greatest show on Earth. It's in London

and it is about to begin.

We then were given our call up.

This is our last walk, really sad.

-Hello.

-Last walk.

My name is Evelyn Glennie and I was one of the drummers.

There is quite a long walk from the dressing room, it is

almost like walking to the gallows where the goose bumps really,

the body is in a completely different state.

Stand by VOM 5 for that woodsman.

And the red arrows fly-past. Go!

-Good Lord.

-It is a nervousness that you're never going to get again.

The Red Arrows fly over the stadium, wow,

this is a really important event.

WHOOPING

-Oh, God, we can't stop now.

-SHE LAUGHS

Can we?

'By the time we got to the stadium

'we were really feeling quite nervous, I think.'

Make sure you get that first one really nice and crisp.

That elbow... Bam!

-Good luck, guys!

-Good luck!

Good luck, guys!

'I felt there was a good feeling.

'I felt that there WOULD be a good response, but I don't think

'I thought about it too much, I was more concerned about

'if I was going to forget what

'I was doing or whether my make-up was going to be right

'or if that bed was going to run anyone over on the way out!'

I'm going to take this moment to wish everybody love and luck for tonight.

Cos after this it just goes from one minute to the next.

'The ceremony started at nine o'clock,

'but we walked out into the floor of the stadium at quarter past seven.'

Standing by for vom one...

We've got rain. Oh, no. OK, it's raining...

-LORD COE:

-It started to rain at ten past seven in the evening.

And I thought, "Please, not tonight."

And this is the only time I've genuinely seen Danny flustered,

was when it started to drizzle.

And what it would have meant

was we couldn't have had the rings with the flames.

An hour before the show only three of the Olympic rings were lit up.

And the other two, all the electrics were soaked

and they had people up there with hairdryers!

Would have meant more than just a technical mishap, it would have been

political in its awfulness.

It affected the props, particularly the clouds,

but the rain was very, very light and then it stopped

and it was fine after that

so the clouds all flew beautifully

and everyone was smiling.

Stand by for music cue zero, please, Nimrod.

20:59...

OK, guys.

I'm with you, we're about to go live to the world...

EXCITED HUBBUB

Good luck...

Voms 3 and 5, balloon children...

Go.

MUSIC: Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations

Mr Wiggins on stage.

Stand by, we've got him on 25, take 25!

Lovely, lovely, lovely...

CHEERING

'Before going on stage we were all sort of psyching ourselves up...'

Bradley ring the bell, now...

BELL CLANGS

'All the Brunels are in position,

everyone's giving themselves top hat nod,

'just making sure everyone's on form, everyone knows where they are,

'and then we get the cue in the air...'

This is Toby. Good luck, everybody, have a ball.

Music cue two... Go.

# And did those feet in ancient time... #

Voms one, two. Brunels - go.

-'"And go." And then it's like, "Oh, my God!"'

-HE LAUGHS

OK, start to notice the Brunels...

Just start to notice them.

# And was the holy Lamb of God... #

Cricket match stop, and just notice them walking by...

# ..On England's pleasant pastures seen... #

"This green and pleasant land", "this isle of wonder" -

it's a very low-key opening for such a sort of big event.

We had a lot of internal confidence about what we were doing.

We wanted the people who were there on the evening

to actually experience something when they walked into the stadium,

so we had this idea that there'd be little motifs playing out

of cricket, or farming...

-And we had these balloons walking round...

-Clouds.

The clouds, it was magical,

and it had a double benefit because it set a tempo

that was narrative,

but also those kind of slings and arrows of people accusing you of doing the Teletubbies...

We were sort of able to laugh that off, cos we knew we had this idea

that this land was going to be literally transformed.

Stand by for Pandemonium.

-How you feeling? Just about to go on.

-Fantastic.

Yeah, good mate. Good.

Big moment?

It's building, mate. It's building.

80,000...

And the rest of the other billion?

Yeah. All the family's here watching.

Three...two...one.

Ken... Go.

-KENNETH BRANAGH:

-Be not afeard!

Be not afeard.

The isle is full of noises.

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not...

'It was very overwhelming.

'It's just the adrenaline - this is now a full stadium.

'You could hear the cheers.

'These are things that you haven't rehearsed or prepared for.'

Standing by for drummers and scene change...

Stand by for the tree to left, stand by for warriors,

and stand by for cast entry onto the field of play.

Voms one, two, three, five and six...

..To dream again!

Go.

'I still remember Rick saying, "I'm with you."

'And it was such a beautiful thing for him to say...'

Working men and women, stand by for lever chisel...

And rumble in one, two, three, four...

'He must have just been aware there's a load of people here

'who have never, ever done anything like this.'

And finish in one, two, three, four...

-Single bosh and "Hoy!", two, three, four.

-ALL:

-Hoy!

-DANNY BOYLE:

-The other one to do with this sequence of moving

into the Industrial Revolution was Evelyn Glennie.

Rick was particularly interested

in this commitment to sound

and commitment when you strike something.

And that really helped me to think

how I might project this piece of music.

Because it was such a large arena,

it needed to be almost over the top in a way.

And finish in one, two, three, four...

Scene change and all cast...

Single bosh and "Hoy!", two, three, four...

Go...

Rumble, two, three, four.

Scene change has begun.

Go, go...

And again, four... Keep it going, three, four...

Plastic buckets, one, two, three, four...

Bosh and yell, one, two, three, four...

Keep it going...

'It actually meant a great deal to me being a black Brunel.

'That says "Anyone can be this man."

'Times have changed. We're living in multicultural Britain now.

'The concept was transformation of England

'as a green and pleasant land driven by agriculture

'into this Industrial Revolution.'

-There are aisles coming up...

-Bosh...

Drummers who have a clear aisle - go!

'I don't how many countries understood what we were doing -

'I think there was a lot of Americans confused Brunel with Abraham Lincoln...'

Plastic and metal buckets, one two, three, four...

The track was fantastic.

It reinforced the feeling of inevitability, of modernisation.

Stand by trap four, down please...

-Standing by.

-Trap four - down, go.

The wonderful thing about the volunteers in that whole moment was

that grass had to go,

and there was acres of it -

I mean, it is like shop loads of carpet roll...

There's a sort of chaos.

It's chaotic but it forms a rhythm and then starts to comes together,

and then these things start to pulse -

the Industrial Revolution forms out of the ground, and...

"Come on, watch this!"

-DANNY BOYLE:

-Well, that first section, what is it?

It's just one massive scene change,

maybe the biggest scene change there's ever been.

-Trap two is clear to fly.

-Stand by, trap two - up, please.

Aerial.

Trap two - up, go.

Come on, let's give it some more energy, more energy!

Looking for the suffragettes on 13...

'It was chaos. Honestly. Absolute chaos.

'You have to make decisions on the night about what you want to do

'and you have to live with them after,

'but there was stuff happening everywhere.

'All in the wrong sequencing,

'and there were things happening

'at exactly the same time so I couldn't cover them both.'

Suffragettes, 13, are they there...?