BBC – Monkey Olympics

Unlike the FIFA World Cup which comes complete with a coherent and accessible narrative, the Olympics seems to require confected fictions in order to glue things together. Impressive though athletic zealotry is, the sprawling assortment of events (with their solipsistic specialization and obsessive quantification of achievement) lacks both the universal poetry of football and its symbolic heart. This represents a communication challenge for promoters of the Games. The American network NBC addressed this in its trailer by interweaving footage of athletes with movie footage of fairy-tale dragons and sword fights from the Mummy sequel released in the same month. The BBC trailer for the Olympics has chosen the Chinese allegory Journey to the West to promote its coverage. This animated story (reinterpreted by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett) weaves miscellaneous Olympic events into a simple narrative. Monkey throws a javelin for Pigsy to catch within the jaws of a sea monster then used as a gymnastic high bar. As the characters skirmish with monsters and overcome obstacles they blend several atomised events into a more purposeful mission. However, the shrewdness of this trailer is in forging an alternative mythology for the Beijing Olympics. The Olympics have long been a vessel for self-aggrandisement and 2008 has been billed for some time as the coronation of China as Superpower. This has raised some cynicism, which the BBC broadcaster addresses in their messaging. This animated piece then is an evocation of a nostalgic, romanticized and non-threatening Asia – retrieving goodwill from the classic Monkey Magic from 1980s television programming in the UK. The plucky, mischievous cartoon Monkey is the perfect antidote avatar for a China which is usually maligned as a lumbering monolith. Hip-hop inflected beats merge with Chinese instrumentation, symbolising a youthful nation open to the West. This is a pilgrimage to the East to Beijing, with the luminous Bird's Nest as the talisman. This is a quest in which we can all feel included. The animated characters are of deliberately indeterminate ethnic origin. The moral out-take is not enlightenment as in the original tale but a message of co-operation between China and the UK: we are all filled with the same hopes, dreams – politics and power can be forgotten in a fortnight of glory.