I doubt many people were watching beyond Midnight, being a Sunday night, and work the next morning.
Mrs MarkyMark just managed to stay awake to see the flame extinguishing, then dropped off.
I wonder what the audience drop off was in Europe ?
That explains it then.
I wanted to make sure I could stay up until the end, so I booked today off work.
I've been looking around for the overnight viewing figures but they haven't appeared yet. It would be nice if they were similar to those for the opening ceremony.
Annoyed by delays, repeats, not very good british music, Sebastian Coe in the end(even though there were some pieces of good music)
When athletes and olympic champions when to parade, my first thought was that the closing ceremony is not a ceremony, but a VIP private concert for athletes.
Even though very 1st part , countdown were quite amazing, to be honest.
But there were few moments , for example, the last medal ceremony
We got a flash of this during Jessie J's performance:
Glad it didn't last too long!
I wonder what would cause that to go out? Would that be sent down by some bars generator on the helicopter by accident, or is it a "loss of signal" backup in case the signal drops off?
Suspect that was generated in a sat truck that was downlinking the helicopter feed. I guess that it would have been connecting directly to the gallery (was that at the IBC or did they use a scanner?) rather than adding a satellite hop.
It looked to me like a bit of finger trouble on the part of the vision mixer - after cutting to those bars for a second the next shot was a short view from a camera pointing at the floor before finding a camera that had a decent shot.
The problem with closing ceremonies always has been the sense of climax, the vast majority wanting things to continue, so the realisation that it's over often clouds perceptions.
They're not, and shouldn't be formal occasions (barring the necessary detail) the rest really is a party for those who took part, so rightly the television audience and the spectators in the stadium really are onlookers.
Almost all the athletes in the Mosh pits seemed to be having a ball, so for them it was a success.
The technical success of the evening had to be getting all the competitors into the arena in a little over ten minutes, whilst the repetition of the music from 'Street Party' has been criticised, I think it worked extraordinarily well, further music would have necessitated more performance space as the acts chosen would have wanted to be there. This would have detracted from the sporting participants.
Only just got to watch most of it this morning (was at Blur's closing ceremony Hyde Park gig last night, amazing night, everyone was doing the Mobot and Harry Enfield came on stage dressed as a tea lady during Parklife), I'd seen lots of negative comments and tweets about the ceremony and I thought it wasn't really that bad. There were lots of bits where I thought things badly needed tightening up though and it really showed that there wasn't the same time to rehearse cameras and the TV direction as the opening ceremony, sometimes it seemed like events were taking the director by surprise. Sound quality wasn't always great, either.
Eddie Butler's Olympic review, though - brilliant.
When athletes and olympic champions when to parade, my first thought was that the closing ceremony is not a ceremony, but a VIP private concert for athletes.
That is kind of the point, the closing ceremony is a letting your hair down and getting together affair... hence they don't parade.
