Commonwealth Games opening ceremony: the best and worst bits

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/jul/24/commonwealth-games-opening-ceremony-good-bad

Version 0 of 1.

The best bits...

• The incongruity of Scottie dogs with little coats on declaring them to be supporting Sierra Leone, or Papua New Guinea. The dogs were supposed to be leading the way for each team to proudly strut their stuff across the Commonwealth stage, but the athletes often ended up carrying their reluctant mascots

• The hats worn by the athletes from the Isle of Man

• Dr Who actor John Barrowman kissing a man and running off with him, given that, according to Stonewall, it is illegal to be gay in 42 of the 53 Commonwealth countries

• The Queen looking disapproving as the Commonwealth Games Federation President Prince Tunku Imran was unable to remove the cap from the baton containing her speech

• The sunshine and palpable sense of enthusiasm

... and the misses

• The overhead shots made it look like a good few ticket-holders had decided to plump for a quiet night in front of the telly instead

• In its echo of the reference to Brookside's lesbian kiss in the London 2012 ceremony, the Barrowman kiss made us seem a rather prurient nation

• On the eve of Scotland's referendum on independence, the ceremony resorted to clichés of the Loch Ness monster, Irn Bru and a sea of tartan instead of telling viewers something new

• The lyrics to Barrowman's song: "We've bagpipes and there's castles, there's monsters in our lochs" and "Now on to the Highlands, or even the Lowlands, the mountains and glens stretch before ye, the mountains and glens stretch before ye, the mist swirls behind ye..." Enough

• As one viewer from Dundee commented: "It felt like a 1960s Albanian entry to the Eurovision song contest. I don't think I've cringed so much in my whole life."