So, we're off. The Games are go. You hang around and wait for the so-called “official declaration” of openness if you like. Tomorrow's fireworks and choreographed schoolchildren in the bird's nest are a mere formality as far as some of us are concerned, and what's more, they're late.

Some of us have already joined Jacqui Oatley in the Shenyang Stadium for Germany v Brazil in the women's football, seen New Zealand v Japan unfurl obscurely in the top right-hand corner of our BBCi “multiscreen” and watched China play Sweden, in front of people who were excited about a women's football match as only a host nation can be.

But that's the Olympics for you. They get going before they get going, thereby offering the viewer an unparalleled opportunity to miss things even before they have started.

But what are you going to do? Your football tournaments are too long for the event that embraces them. Are you going to trim the tournaments until they fit? Or are you going to front-load them before anyone's really looking? The latter, of course. It's the Olympic way.

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And so it was that the Beijing 2008 Games drew their first breath, with not so much as a solitary pianist or acrobat on stilts in sight. And what a relief to be able to report that smog was not a factor in the drawing of that breath.

Speculation in the build-up had led many of us to expect that the air would have the density of Plasticine and the colour of David Dickinson. On the contrary, you could see one side of the pitch from the other at all times yesterday, and the skies were positively smokeless.

In fact, our hunch, carefully formed in a living room 5,000 miles away from the action, is that this smog business has been drummed up, that smog will not be a factor at all in the coming weeks and that the American cyclists who walked through the airport in face masks the other day need a good slap, even after apologising to the organisers.

If the Olympics have caught you off guard, there is no real excuse. If you're not ready by now, you never will be. For many days, the television schedules have been awash with China-themed tie-in programmes. In the past two days alone, the casual viewer has been briefed on Beijing's architectural revolution (The Culture Show), brought up to speed with the state of China's economy (a Newsnight special report) and taught to wok-fry beef in an orange-and-honey glaze (Chinese Food Made Easy).

We, though, have been too busy travelling the breadth of China, testing the country's new claims to political “openness” in the company of Panorama and the legend that is John Sweeney - a bad mood in a baggy suit who last year wrote his name in the pantheon of investigative journalism by going screaming mad in the face of a Scientologist.

Sweeney and his crew were issued with a Chinese Government minder - an innocent-looking guy, wearing casual shorts and a T-shirt, yet whose job it was to stick just behind Sweeney's shoulder and, in the event of any unwanted messiness, to lift the corner of the carpet and operate a state-approved broom.

And so it was that, as a victim of the policing of Tiananmen Square in 1989 began to explain how he lost his legs under a tank, the man in the shorts moved in and said, “It would be great if we could skip this.” Wouldn't it be?

But let's not pretend that China is the only place where censorship applies. Olympic Dreams, the

BBC's absorbing series on the preparations of British competitors, introduced us to Ken Barnsley, the go-to man for all your horse-appropriate music needs. Picking the tunes for the top riders' dressage routines, Barnsley is, in his own way, a censor, at least to the extent that he is trying to write a version of history without the band Survivor in it.

“There was one competition where the judge had to listen to Eye of the Tiger six times,” Barnsley reported. As they say in China, it would be great if we could skip this.

And Barnsley does, in favour of, among other things, an orchestral arrangement of Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal. Is that better, though? You decide. We've got an Olympics to watch - eight men's football matches to fit in today alone. Blimey.

Imagine what it's going to be like when the Games actually start.