The Odyssey

I'd been presenting a radio show about London

for nearly 20 years and when I first started presenting the show,

people had a fairly negative image of London

and I kept saying, "No, no, no. It's a fantastic place."

And slowly, I saw it change around

so that people started agreeing with me.

Till the point by about 2005 when there was kind of this consensus

that this might be the greatest city in the world.

We were seeing great architecture, we were seeing Grand Projets,

We were getting new bridges, we were getting new galleries.

Our filmmakers were making great films, our bands were everywhere.

There was an international sense that it was London's time.

You could kind of feel it on the streets.

There was a... a pride, an optimism.

Our economy was doing well.

Our government had abolished boom and bust,

so we could bid for the Olympics

with huge confidence that we could afford it.

-TONY BLAIR:

-Give us the chance

to host the world's most important, special sporting event,

here in the world's greatest capital city.

I know we won't let them down.

First of all, the President...

The International Olympic Committee has the honour of announcing

that the Games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012

are awarded

to the city of London!

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I was actually in Trafalgar Square,

so I witnessed the euphoria

coming out of the centre of London, and it really was amazing.

The thing that I seem to have seen more times than anything else

is me and Kelly Holmes jumping up and down, hugging each other.

We just exploded and the whole of Trafalgar Square exploded.

EDDIE IZZARD: So, we're setting up a British Olympics

where each and every event is a British event,

like the British 100 metres.

"Excuse me. Pardon me. Excuse me. I think I was here first."

LAUGHTER

We should win that.

I'm the supervisor at Aldgate. We've just had a big explosion.

There appears to be something ahead of the train in the track.

There was just a very loud bang. There was smoke everywhere.

Four bombs detonated on the London transport system,

causing chaos and confusion.

But as the full scale of the tragedy began to emerge,

suspicions turned to terrorism.

A friend of mine was killed in the bombings

and so I remember the day that we won the Olympics very well.

It was Jen Nicholson, who was killed on the Edgware Road train,

and her mum was the vicar

who said that she couldn't forgive the bombers,

therefore she was being hypocritical and resigned from the church.

There are sporting events and it was great excitement around that,

but it's not something which is as important

as people losing their lives,

and so the Olympics just disappeared out of all thoughts.

The bombings the day after the bid was an immediate corrective

to anyone who felt a kind of rosiness, you know,

a glow that everything was fine in London.

Everything isn't fine.

The reason the 7/7 bombings were so dreadful

is that London was attacked by British people.

Two weeks after that, there was another series of bombings.

Although they weren't successful, they implied

that there were a very large number of people

out there in Britain who were ready to mount attacks.

Police in London have admitted that the man shot dead

at an underground station on Friday had no connection

with the series of attempted bomb attacks

across the capital on Thursday.

It's emerged that he was a 27-year-old Brazilian -

Jean Charles De Menezes.

He was working in London as an electrician.

The jury have clearly said that the police lied,

that Jean was completely innocent

and that from the moment Jean entered Stockwell Tube Station,

he was doomed to be shot dead without warning.

If you had to choose one figure

and symbolise what the Olympics can express,

you would choose Jesse Owens, who went to Berlin in 1936

and made a mockery of Adolf Hitler's theories of ethnicity.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The particular part of East London, of sort of Stratford,

the Lea Valley, I don't even really quite know what to call it.

The Olympic site.

This part of London, I think, to many Londoners was a mystery.

So the idea that you could build some great Olympic Citadel there

was quite fascinating,

cos it was a bit like someone had found a new continent.

For all I know, there may be forms of life there

that had never been seen by mankind.

It was industrial London when we had industries.

Traditionally, it was smelly London because of the prevailing winds,

so rich people lived in the west

because it smelt terrible in the east.

When you think of old London,

you think of somewhere east of the city

because that is the mythical dark soul of London.

Governments very rarely get a chance to have a multi-billion regeneration

of one of the poorest areas in their capital city.

This event, this one event is going

to change the shape of that area of London forever.

I hope they make a difference to the East End of London.

I hope when they've gone, when the Games are finished,

that they're left with something that they can keep and they can use.

I've got no interest in the sport aspect at all.

I'm more interested in what it's going to do for the economy.

A lot of the businesses that provide jobs for ordinary people,

you know, like warehousing jobs and similar,

that's all going to be affected cos it's going to be built on.

The sporting legacy most important for me is really recognising

that getting more young people

into sport is not just a good sports policy,

it's a good education policy, it's a good health policy,

it's actually a great policy for social inclusion.

That is one of the strongest parts of this legacy.

If you took sport away from the East End of London,

you'd have gang wars and street wars and things like that, you know.

You either kick a ball or punch someone on the nose.

There's no horse riding, there's no golf,

there's none of these luxurious sports.

There's nothing my boxers have never won.

They've all won everything,

from the little schoolboy 11-year-old

to the Olympic gold medallist.

You put a kid on a bag, you say,

"Go and hit the bag, son," or, "Go and hit the ball,"

and you just watch.

Within half-a-minute, you know that that kid's got a talent,

and you're born with that, you know.

There ain't too many Muhammad Alis about.

Oh, he danced all right.

He had everything. Balance and timing and distance.

He was a perfect example,

and I'm sure that the world followed him, you know.

"I wanna be like him."

BELL RINGS

APPLAUSE

FIONA BRUCE: The cost of the 2012 London Olympics

could be nearly three times the original estimate of £3.4 billion.

The spiralling costs have prompted calls for a radical rethink.

These sums are beyond all reason.

You're going to be burgling the charities,

burgling the heritage, burgling the arts, burgling sport to pay for them.

It's quite wrong.

You can't tell people that's a sensible way of spending money.

Over the top.

Well over the top. They want more money now.

They should have had this worked out properly, really, in my eyes

Where's the money going, who's the money for? That's what I want to know.

Some fat cat's getting it, aren't they?

I'm for it, but at the same time, I teach social housing.

I know there is a massive credit crunch

and there are people suffering that don't have anywhere to live.

There's housing benefit cuts, lack of housing, lack of jobs.

Then again, you've got to have a bit of joy in life

and a bit of celebration. I don't see any harm in that.

China's moment at the centre of the world stage has finally arrived.

Thousands of homes made way for 37 competition venues

and millions of people were relocated.

Some things that are not so good have happened on the way

to building this thing but I don't think it's anything like the scale

on which that happened in Beijing

when nobody could utter a squeak of protest.

We saw the Chinese government flexing its muscles

in a very impressive, rather intimidating way.

They built fantastic facilities but it wasn't really built for the Chinese people.

It was built to show the world this is what we can do, this is what we are going to be in the future.

The work credit is derived from a Latin word, "credo,"

which actually means belief or trust.

This is a crisis not just of credit. It is a crisis of trust.

Just before the markets opened,

the Chancellor was doing a round of television interviews

explaining how he'd just committed vast sums of taxpayers' money.

Up to 50 billion to inject capital into banks,

250 billion to underwrite their debts

and a further 200 billion in short-term loans.

I think it's capitalism eating its own arsehole.

It's just gone a bit to the end.

You can only eat so much into something like that.

I had quite a job persuading my Cabinet colleagues that

we should bid for the Olympics.

I think that the faint hearts, as I regarded them at the time,

might have prevailed had they known that in five years,

we were going to be heading for a downturn.

I wish we hadn't been lied to and I'm sure we were.

The original estimate, I don't think anybody with any sense ever believed

it was going to be possible to restrict it to that.

Both the times that London's held the Games in the past

have been emergency Games.

The 1948 Olympics, which are now known as the Austerity Games,

were a comparatively small-scale affair.

The athletes were treated as if they'd just turned up to a village sports day

and very successful it was.

So it showed that something could be done in difficult circumstances and

of course, that sprang to mind when the global economic crisis occurred.

As it turns out, they seem not to have taken that option

but they've spent the money anyway.

I make this promise to everyone in Britain.

You will not be left on your own in this.

We are doing this as a government because we have to.

This government will not cut the deficit

in a way that hurts those we most need to help,

in a way that divides our country or in a way that undermines

the spirit and the ethos of our vital public services.

When they did close the youth centres, they didn't even alert the young people

so it was like one day the youth centre was there

and then the next it was gone. It is a sad story,

the cuts are affecting young people a lot

but the government doesn't realise what they are doing to us.

Everybody used to go to youth clubs.

It's not like they made youth clubs but no one used to go.

People used to go to youth clubs every day. Now look.

We walk down the streets and we are getting pulled over by police.

There's nothing here for us, like.

I think it's going to be swarming.

I think people are going to be trying to find things to do.

People want jobs and that's going to be frustrating.

You've got a lot of people out here. There will be riots.

There will be riots.

I play hockey. I'm captain of my team and I just think

sports should be actually drilled into kids from a young age.

Most European cities do it

and their crime rates go down because the kids are doing something else

than going out and messing around with alcohol and drugs and stuff.

The L word is the difficult one, the legacy.

Of course, London went very heavy on this idea that the Games

would inspire a new generation, not only in the UK but around the world.

The difficulty is how do you get hundreds of thousands of kids

getting involved in sport that they wouldn't necessarily have got involved in?

There's only so much you can do. You can only open the doors

and of course the difficulty we have is that just when

we're wanting to have all these doors open to swimming pools,

sports centres etc, local authorities are closing them.

The timing couldn't be any worse.

Sport in the community could not be any lower down the pecking order

at a time when it should be right at the very top.

That's a political reality.

Coe and Ovett was a wonderful yin and yang rivalry.

They were the same nationality, but that was about all in common.

One of them won a race the other should have won

and the other got his revenge by winning the race

that the rival was expected to win.

Their names will forever be entwined.

You want a kind of signature feat, something that happens

that people will forever identify with the Games of 2012

as they did with Jesse Owens in Berlin,

Ali in Rome, Bolt in Beijing.

Just something that recalibrates people's expectations

of what is possible.

For me, I think the greatest, most beautiful and most resonant

Olympic moment of them all is watching Tommie Smith and John Carlos

who came first and third in the 200 metres.

These two black athletes raise their hands

and they do the black power salute.

I do remember seeing it live and realising even then

as a nine-year-old boy that this was something pretty special.

Suddenly, the Olympics was for the poor, the dispossessed,

the disenfranchised.

When I returned to the UK having been abroad for three years,

it did seem a rather different country.

Poorer, particularly outside London. More paranoid, more anti-immigrant.

We've had the MPs' expenses scandal which convinced us

that most MPs were crooked.

We've had the phone hacking scandal

which suggested that many newspapers were corrupt and immoral.

There have been a series of events in this country

which have undermined and poisoned British people's views

of established institutions.

The police have too much power and they are using that power.

My old man didn't pull out no gun, no nothing.

They shot him for no reason.

Listen, at war, you lose some, you win some.

This is war right now on the streets.

As you can see, it's war for our young people.

Give us a tomorrow. Given the kids a tomorrow.

There's no tomorrow.

I escaped on her back through the corridor

and locked myself into the kitchen because there is a fire door.

I thought they can't break that easily.

I could hear them breaking everything and it was terrifying.

She is working hard to make her business work and then you lot

want to go and burn it up, for what?

Just to say that you're warring and you're a bad man?

This is about a man who got shot in Tottenham.

This ain't about having fun in a riot and busting up the place.

Get it real, black people. Get real! Do it for a cause.

If we are fighting for a cause, let's fight for a cause!

-You lot piss me the

-BLEEP

-off and I'm ashamed to be a Hackney person.

We're not all gathering together and fighting for a cause,

were running down Foot Locker and stealing shoes.

My youngest daughter, who's eight,

she just... I don't think she's got over it yet.

The party shop at Clapham Junction was burnt down

and her question was, "Why would anyone bomb a party shop?

"Were they having a party? What was going on?"

You can't explain that.

These crowds were organising themselves using social networking.

Why weren't the police on Twitter, on Facebook,

on BlackBerry messaging, getting one step ahead of the crowd?

They're happy to let Tottenham High Road burn

because there's nothing there worth saving in their view,

not worth the trouble. Had that been Ladbroke Grove

or the King's Road or Sloane Street,

they'd have been there in a flash.

I got really impressed.

I got impressed not for the riots.

I got impressed by the reaction of Londoners.

That's shown to London and to England

that there is a massive social problem

and the fact that loads of people here didn't accept that,

I think is a sign of blindness.

A lot of people have this image that this is a peaceable city

and usually it is.

But actually, historically if you look back,

the London mob is always there.

In present times we can go through the poll tax riots,

the Brixton riots, the Tottenham riots.

The London mob is always there.

It's almost a force which when certain pressures are applied,

will erupt.

But it's the first riot that good old lefties like me

have not been able to wholeheartedly think was right,

because it was materialistic.

These things happen in massive cities.

They don't happen very often.

There's always a short-term reason for it and I think come the Olympics

everything is going to go smoothly and swimmingly

and I think everyone will be behind the event.

Have you ever seen anyone more confident on a four-inch beam?

10 she's got! Nadia Comaneci.

There is a double-edged sword with London.

It kind of gets you down a bit and then you go away and think,

I can't really leave it. London is so rich culturally

in terms of what you've got access to.

It makes a part of who you are

and I want my kids to enjoy that as well.

It's a little bit risky, a little bit woah, a little bit way.

As you walk down here, you get different looks from kids.

Is he going to come over and mug me or is he going to ask me the time or where a shop is?

You never know what's around the corner, do you, in London.

You see so much. Turn the corner, there's something new.

There's an alleyway, a courtyard, something going on, something you haven't seen before.

I walk and cycle, that's my main ways of getting around London.

I find it a very beautiful city.

I think the diversity of styles of architecture

and of all the different people that live here make it just a constant treat.

I'm from the countryside originally so living here

in such a multicultural city has been an amazing experience.

It's a tough city but once you get the key, it's just yours, I think.

London is a more unequal, more troubled city than it was

since the bankers inflicted their crisis on the rest of us.

Probably in greater need of a party to lift its spirits.

It's a wonderful city for rich people.

You can see that in the transformation of Canary Wharf

or the wealth that you see being spent by the hedge fund managers in Mayfair.

It is a fantastic city for young creative people.

There's a vibrancy and an edge to it you don't really find anywhere,

not in such density, anywhere else in the world.

I just decided to come here for six months and now it's five years.

I think it's the capital of the contemporary arts, London, now.

I can sell paintings, I can live.

I don't make a lot of money now but still people buy from emergent artists.

I'm excited.

I will watch it on TV but I want to be just walking in the area

and seeing the people from the world. I believe in people.

I like to talk, I like to know the story.

One of the things that London does

and I hope it's one of the things London continues to do

but I'm worried, is London is and always has been cheek by jowl.

Rich and poor don't necessarily live in different neighbourhoods.

Black and white don't live in different neighbourhoods.

Muslim and Christian aren't separated by a divide.

They're literally next door to each other.

We have all sorts of things to thank for that, at least partly the Luftwaffe.

I live in a street of million pound houses and council flats.

When the million pound houses got bombed, they built council flats.

You're forced to have that kind of mix

and that's true across London.

I'm really excited.

I'm going to be sitting in Victoria Park in Hackney

when I don't have tickets to the event and I'm going to sit in that park

with a picnic, with a wine or beer,

and I'm going to be watching everything.

But I'd rather hang out with lots of local Londoners

or people who call London their home.

I think it would be an extra dimension to it.

I don't think I'm going to be around here during the Games.

I think I'm going to avoid London, to be honest.

It does have a really good transport system but it's busy now!

Imagine thousands and thousands and thousands of people

trying to get into a bus or a tube. You're not going to go anywhere.

As a city, I don't think we are a big enough community sometimes.

We don't come together for a lot so I'm hoping the London Olympics gives London a chance

for everyone to pick a sport, all come together, support Great Britain as a whole

and having it in London just brings that community together

which I think is what we need, especially after everything

that happened over the last few years since we've got the bid.

London is not the happy-go-lucky Cool Britannia city that it was

when we got the Olympics.

It is perhaps a slightly more reticent city than it was

for all sorts of reasons. The bombs, the riots.

We've had the biggest economic collapse since the 1930s.

Lifetimes of stuff has happened since that joyous, screaming day

in Trafalgar Square, but it's still London.

It probably is still the greatest city in the world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd