TV review: World Cup opening ceremony

The park opener with its dancers, screen projections on the turf, hammerhead sharks and ukulele-accompanied version of World in Union somehow made sense. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Fireworks are erupting above the city. Tugboats are dancing in the harbour. Men are seemingly leaping down tall buildings in a single bound. A pipe band is playing on the museum steps. A Maori warrior is spinning a bullroarer atop a silo on the other side of the city. A gospel choir is singing it from the rooftops.

This - All Lit Up, the wildly ambitious musical and fireworks finale to last night's RWC opening ceremony - is something you could only take all in via the multi-camera magic of television.

And like the Eden Park wonder of visuals and choreography a few minutes earlier, it is quite breathtaking ... except ... because it is a TV event, it has commentary. Empty, stating-the-obvious, here's-some-key-phrases-from-our-script-notes-we-prepared-earlier commentary from One News anchor Wendy Petrie and sports mouth Andrew Saville.

They do go silent for a while and let the pyrotechnics and the massed musicians work their wonders but come back to drone on again, with more wooden patter, and reassure us that, yes, there is some rugby coming.

True, if you, like me had been couchbound since the beginning of the television coverage at 4pm (Te Karere covering the arrival of the waka at the Viaduct Harbour live and in te reo), you might have forgotten there was a game on.

Though you could have amused yourself by counting every time Simon Dallow or one of the other telly faces down on the waterfront intoned "the atmosphere is totally electric" as fans pulled faces over their shoulders at the camera.

And it was a few hours fraught with technical difficulties, odd decisions (crossing live to the fanzone in Christchurch's Hagley Park where the army band outnumbered the fans) and the feeling that other than rampant hakas and the Dave Dobbyn songs, this was going to be a guess-you-had-to-be-there experience - and the massed forces of One and TV3 at the waterfront were just too caught up in the chaos to make it vicarious fun for us at home.

But after the extremely-padded evening bulletins came the utter dazzle of the Eden Park opening ceremony. It came complete with land yachts, then even bigger land yachts.

The park opener - with its screen projections on the turf, its hammerhead sharks, its ukulele-accompanied version of World in Union, its young player getting some words of wisdom from Jonah Lomu - somehow made sense. And it sure packed a visual wallop.

It also set the fuse to the city fireworks and the Don McGlashan-composed All Lit Up quite beautifully.

If only we had got to hear the whole thing.