´óÏó´«Ã½

A day of travelling in East London courtesy of a garishly-pink London 2012 bus - part of a fleet taking the media and officials around the Olympic Park - is followed by a day in the office thinking about some of the lessons from the "Two Years To Go" celebrations. Here are four for starters.

Read the rest of this entry

I mentioned in my previous blog that we're launching a new ´óÏó´«Ã½ London 2012 website to mark Two Years To Go to the Olympic Games. In the latest of our occasional series of guest contributors, my colleague Mark Coyle - the site editor - sets out what he and the team are trying to achieve.

The ´óÏó´«Ã½'s 2012 site is designed to be your starting point for everything we have to offer that's related to 2012 - sport, news, programmes and plenty more, including loads about the cultural and festival activity linked to the .

Video and live broadcasts will take pride of place on our site, which draws together the many and varied strands that make up the 2012 experience and building towards a climax in two years' time.

Read the rest of this entry

How does one of the show that it'll be soon be ready to stage the biggest global sport event?

That challenge is facing the organisers of the London Olympics as we head for yet another major milestone: the "" mark on 27 July.

Now that South Africa's World Cup is just a memory, it's London that will be moving to centre stage - and we're about to have a test of that readiness, and our most detailed look so far at the construction work.

Read the rest of this entry

Sport and drama have never struck me as the most obvious bedfellows. For every success like "Chariots of Fire" there are multiple failures with dippy storylines and implausible action sequences - and most of the time live sport is drama enough in itself. The fictionalised version is second best.

There's also curiously little drama where sport is a key part of the story, despite its importance to so many people's lives, and I suspect that's partly because too much of the sport and arts worlds don't understand each other. There are exceptions, but one of the challenges around 2012 as a year is that mixing culture and sport can be an oil-and-water job.

So an Olympic medal to the people who made "Dive", which is showing on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Two this Thursday and Friday and then available on the iPlayer. You can read more about it here and read Aisling Loftus's blog on lead role in Dive here - but it's a simple story.

A teenage girl called Lindsey is training with the hope of being part of the GB diving team for . But she gets pregnant, and the film is about the way she and her boyfriend try to sort out their lives.

I've just been watching a preview, and it's terrific: powerfully acted and great to look at, as you'd expect from someone with the track record of .

Read the rest of this entry