The final yards of the Olympic flame's troubled journey to the cauldron left it to be carried around the stadium's roof by a slowly pedalling Chinese gymnast on a pulley. Smart move. It would take a special kind of freelance protester with a fire extinguisher to ambush the torch up there.

And thus, without political incident and in a flurry of fire, ended surely the most remarkable opening ceremony seen at an Olympic Games, and without doubt the longest - more than four hours of hellzapoppin', firework-crackin', athlete-marchin' action.

Well, OK - most of it was athlete-marchin', in fact. It took a while, didn't it? People around me were beginning to lose the will to live somewhere around the arrival of plucky Dominica (one competing athlete). There's a viable theory that, when you've seen one Moldovan table tennis player talking into his mobile phone, you've seen them all. In years to come, viewers will be asking each other: “Were you still up for Germany?”

Before the parade, though, the entertainment was unprecedented and hair-raising. Astonishing scenes. The advance of firework footprints across the city, 2,008 drummers doing the countdown from 60 - and then, to cap it all, the sight of Andy Murray, the world's most miserable tennis player, happily waving a little flag on a stick.

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Heaven knows what it was like to watch this if you were one of the people charged with designing the follow-up for London in 2012. One can only imagine a series of increasingly panicked phone calls taking place. “Did you see that? A shower of silver dust which formed the Olympic rings? And then somehow lifted up into the air? How the hell ...”

Then, a little later, perhaps after the sequence in which the dancers in suits of lights suddenly arranged themselves in a perfect simulacrum of the Bird's Nest stadium, the phone ringing again. “You know what? At this rate, I'm not sure we're going to be able to get away with Chas and Dave after all.”

On the other hand, maybe the London people were rejoicing. After all, they don't have a ghostly chance of matching what we saw yesterday, and even if they tried, the locals would only grumble about wasted money. So, pressure off. Bring on a Routemaster bus, a couple of beefeaters and a big inflatable packet of fish and chips.

Because it was China, the BBC drafted Huw Edwards, the newscaster, and Carrie Gracie, a China correspondent, to help out the sports department's Hazel Irvine with the opening ceremony's political context. The thinking seeming to be that, when Huw read from the programme about “harmony between man and nature” and said things like, “It's very cleverly done”, it would bear an altogether more convincing weight of authority than when, say, Barry Davies used to do it.

We're not sure. But it did allow everyone to get involved in lots of news studio-style name-checking, “Well, Huw.” “As you say, Carrie.” “That's right, Hazel.” They seem to be planning to use Sir Steve Redgrave and Michael Johnson for the actual athletics. But surely the complexity cries out for Gavin Esler and Anna Ford.

Meanwhile, the team with the most handheld camcorders were Australia. The team that appeared to have borrowed their uniform from the cabin crew of the plane that flew them over were Sweden. The team most suitably dressed for a shift on the meat counter at Tesco were Kazakhstan. And the senior dignitary most apparently confused by the Chinese version of alphabetical order was the Princess Royal, seen enthusiastically waving her fan at Togo.

The people one was most in awe of, though, were the Chinese girls in white caps, instructed to form a ring around the stadium and keep moving and waving for the duration of the parade of athletes - ie, for roughly 9 hours. People are talking about the physical challenges offered by the road cycling and the open-water swimming, but if it's true endurance you want to celebrate, you've got to hand it to those greeters for keeping it going through the Angola handball team and still having a big finish in the locker for the arrival of China. Huw?