Olympics 2012: The Opening Ceremony

Looking forward to watching it all again - so as to see all the bits missed whilst on Facebook, Twitter, here etc.

Was it my imagination or did Sir Paul go out of time slightly at the start of Hey Jude?

He definitely wasn't miming in time. A bit of an anti-climax really considering how prominent the idea of the next generation had been moments earlier.

I was expecting Take That or Pixie Lott!

We'd thought he'd missed his mime cue, started playing and lost the bump-up so they scrapped it and he just sung 'unplugged' so to speak. Perhaps with a stadium that large, the recorded track may have helped.

On a show like this I would expect them to be playing along to a multitrack recording of all parts of the band, so if anything fails, you just whack the multitrack channel fader up and carry on (and fix if possible).

I did a gig recently with a #1 artist who's bass guitarist was double booked, so the bass guitar was played off the multitrack and they got a local bassist to pretend to play the songs. None of the audience noticed.

I thought it was a shame the stadium announcers messed up the timings when naming the young athletes who lit the cauldron, but that was a tiny detail in a fantastic show.

Speaking of which- does anyone know who the stadium announcers were?

EDIT: Actually found the answer to one of them. The female announcer was Layla Anna Lee, a TV presenter.

The woman was Layla Anna-Lee, the host of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee party in Trafalgar Square. (She's local to me, she lives in Huntingdon).

I don't know who the man was.

I'm afraid this Layla absolutely ruined it for me. A strange combination of condescension and smugness, and my Facebook and Twitter feeds were full of people asking who the heck the "little girl doing the dreadful announcements" was.

Just discovered that the male announcer was Marc Edwards as found here.

I thought she sounded rather lovely... Very British !