Stuart Wolfendale

Cramped, tawdry and self conscious are just three of a bin liner full of adjectives you could stick your hand into to describe the opening ceremony of Hong Kong’s East Asian Games. The show was staged on a clumsy pontoon which had been loaded with scenery parts from an old production of Showboat. It looked perilously, pathetically crowded on there.  You had the impression that the old Star Ferry pier had been reconstructed. Any minute whistles would blow, ramps would drop and the wobbling pent up runners and jumpers, the six uncoordinated little  girls with pom-poms, the scratch  dance band,  the  non -Olympic flame holders and the incongruously immaculate policemen with  the flags rammed in their navels would  all pour off in great relief  onto the ‘Morning Star’.

One point of theatre seems to have eluded the organizers. Stadiums have tremendous utility in staging spectaculars because they are circular. A waterfront is linear. They had talked about using the Harbour to fabulous advantage. Apart  from, yet again, fireworks, they turned their backs on it

All the viewers saw was a backdrop procession of tarted up cargo carriers which ply upriver , decked out like a floating whorehouse to represent a territory, carrying dancers and flag wavers  who had thrown synchronization to the sea breeze.

The crowd on the SS Pontoon wasn’t beaming out rapture. Smiles were fixed with pins and the visiting athletes could barely turn up the corners of their mouths. When you saw how they got up there,  this should not surprise. The setting just off pontoon had an under-flyover flavour. The cameras showed a damp, stygian street to walk down , the usual scattering of crash barriers against a crowd that was not there  and a tin staircase up to the surface.

Apparently, many of the athletes did not turn up till well into the week of the Games, possibly because there was not enough room for them on the pontoon. The small packets of them that could be mustered to do the waving walk past looked cheated . They had no stadium of roaring spectators to wave at, just a thousand or so hand picked chums of Hong Kong’s Bourbon elite. So some of them even kept their hands in their pockets.

 One young athlete walked on holding his camera, hoping to capture it all like they did in the stadium at the real Olympics. When he saw that what he had to snap was Fok, Donald Tsang, a State Councillor and a bunch of ageing pooh bahs, he put it away, poor lad.

The behaviour of the carefully filtered audience in the stand on the land was highly peculiar. Timothy Fok gave a speech of welcome in both languages, the tedium of which so clearly exhausted him, he was in danger of dropping off towards the end of the Cantonese version. The very moment after the formal words of opening had left the State Councillor’s lips, the crowd leapt to their feet to leave. It was though they had all been shown a large plate of oranges. I have seen cinemas empty with greater decorum.

This left the athletes, the little pom-pom girls, the soldiery, the band and, now, a woman singer all lined up like a brigade of bobbing castaways, belting out oddly antiquated Canto pop numbers to empty seats. For viewers, it could have been the wind up ensemble number for another gaseous TVB  ’spectacular’.

Anything to do with any manner of public celebration in Hong Kong distills itself down to this slurry sing-song. It is the only way they know. In the business of public style, Hong Kong, left to itself, has no class. Considering that public money was being spent vastly with no hope of return, could they not have brought Rowse out of retirement to feist it up?