Over the last few days I have grown extremely curious about tonight’s closing ceremony in Paris. The rumours that Tom Cruise is somehow going to be involved as his character from Top Gun really intrigued me, I must admit. I read that it has something to do with the handover to LA28. That is fairly logical, although if you ask me it also raises several questions: why select the Top Gun franchise for this role? Whereas James Bond was probably the obvious choice for his inclusion in the opening ceremony of London 2012, American cinema has hundreds of hero and superhero characters the guys behind this could have chosen from. Moreover, whereas Happy and Glorious was special in large part because it drew together one of British cultures most beloved icons with our longest reigning monarch in a way that nobody would ever have thought possible, it is not clear that what we will see this evening is going to make such a surprising juxtaposition. As a result, I suspect it will fall entirely flat: it’s clearly an attempt to steal 007’s thunder and inflate Top Gun onto the same cultural level, but it lacks any understanding of what actually made Bond meeting the queen so awesome.