After Simon Rattle had provided the backing for an over-extended Mr Bean joke (answer number two to how you make the whole world smirk simultaneously) we were into the digital age -- a moment at which the detail and inclusiveness of Boyle’s vision began to cause real problems for the first time. Where many of his Olympic predecessors had said to hell with human scale, treating people as pixels, Boyle instead insisted on individual close-ups and a romantic narrative, further complicating the picture with lightning fast clips of various movies. I don’t know whether it worked in the stadium. But it didn’t work where most people were watching. In fact it was as if a KTel music compilation had been given the biggest budget ever for a television ad. In the end though that didn’t really matter. If you can pull the Queen out of your sleeve you’ve won the game before it’s even halfway over. And if you finish with a beautiful Thomas Heatherwick cauldron, which allows a large group of young athletes to light the flame simultaneously -- you’ve won twice over. Boyle’s ceremony was eccentric, individualistic, mischievous where it mattered (the first lesbian kiss on Saudi Arabian television?) and almost never guilty of the worked up abstractions that are the besetting sin of such extravaganzas. The scoffers didn’t go entirely unnourished -- they had Lord Coe to feed on -- but they surely ended the evening feeling that the pickings had been thin.