In all, I think it’s fair to say that I found the four ceremonies of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games a little if not gravely disappointing. I was expecting so much, yet got relatively little. This, after all, is the city of light, the city of love, and the city of art. I had high hopes of witnessing something jaw dropping, but in the end I’m afraid to say my jaw remained firmly in place. In 2012, London gave us moments we all still remember, or at least were thinking about for a long time after: moments like Bond meeting the queen, or Eric Idle getting shot out of a cannon before singing Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life. Moments which leave us collectively spellbound. Think too of Brian May thrashing out the national anthem from the top of Buckingham Palace, or Stephen Hawking singing the Galaxy Song – while they did not have anything to do with the Olympics, they were similarly awe-inspiring: Iconic cultural moments which had us all collectively asking “How the zark did they make that happen?”

Yet I can’t remember seeing any such moments in Paris this year. Of course I could be wrong, and I would be happy to be corrected, but to my mind we didn’t see anything really spectacular or phenomenal this year. I can’t help feeling rather disappointed about that. I had such high hopes and expectations, but in the end all four ceremonies seemed rather dull and uninspiring. That is not to say that I found them bad, just lacking the je ne sais quoi I was kind of hoping for and expecting. Paris was centre stage for the first time in a century; it had the world’s attention. To be honest it could probably have done so much more.