The King in a Tardis? Bonkers and ambitious... his mother would have no doubt approved

Published: 11:02, 24 July 2026 | Updated: 11:10, 24 July 2026 Twelve summers ago 40,000 of us sat in a stadium bathed in evening sunshine and watched a confident, reinvented Glasgow bellow its welcome to the world. Though the benchmark for success at that Commonwealth Games opening ceremony was the London Olympics curtain raiser of two years earlier – a spectacular with twice the budget – somehow Glasgow rose to the occasion. Remember those dancing Tunnock’s teacakes? The darling Scottie dogs which led out each of the teams? Well, here we were again – except this was no stadium. Our numbers were reduced to 12,000; the stage was smaller, the athlete cohort leaner. Yet, remarkably, last night’s opener was almost as ambitious – and no less bonkers – than its predecessor. Was that their Majesties the King and Queen stepping out of a Doctor Who Tardis as they arrived on stage? Whose (brilliant) idea was it to put cycling legend Sir Chris Hoy at the controls as the seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy, was shut out of his own vehicle? And, through the drone of the bagpipes, have we finally found a way to communicate with the Loch Ness Monster? That was the inspired suggestion last night as the mythical creature – lured out of the water by Outlander star Sam Heughan – appeared to coax a pipe band into playing Flower of Scotland. King Charles and Queen Camilla step out of The Tardis from the TV series Doctor Who as former track cyclist SIr Chris Hoy looks on during the opening ceremony For the 2026 jamboree, we had decamped from Celtic Park to a mere arena. If the sun was smiling down on the OVO Hydro last night, those of us gathered inside in the darkness were not to know. What we certainly knew is the benchmark for this ceremony would inevitably be that fondly remembered one of 2014 – and that they would surely stand in stark contrast. As I recall, the games 12 years ago came as a blessed relief in the middle of a fractious referendum campaign in which Scotland contrived to tear itself apart. The festival of elite sport brought temporary cohesion. Today that national divide has an air of permanence. The 2026 edition of the Games has, in many eyes, been landed on Glasgow rather than awarded to the city. No football stadium has been pressed into action at these games. They’re all too big. The athletics programme will be played out at a suburban venue – Scotstoun – which maxes out at a mere 11,000. How, then, could the present showpiece compete with a moment in a very different time? The answer is it was never designed to do so. Last night’s production – albeit brimming with imagination and stagecraft – was a masterclass in cutting one’s cloth to suit a new reality. The 2014 Games swallowed over £500million of public money. The 2026 ones are not supposed to cost Glasgow or taxpayers a single penny. Viewed through that lens, the two-hour Hydro carnival looked like a steal. Looking down from my vantage point in Row Z in the highest seating tier of the circular arena I spied an overgrown Glasgow garden divided in four by the St Andrews cross. There was a ring of light around it which, to these eyes, looked suspiciously like the SNP’s crossed ribbon loop logo. Subliminal advertising? From up there in the gods, the green space was nowhere near football pitch-sized. It looked more like an allotment. Grandiosity was not the only thing missing from the 2026 ceremony. People were missing too – foremost among them, sadly, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, who died in 2022 and 2021 respectively. Athletes from around the world entered the Hydro arena before taking their seats for the Opening Ceremony In 2014 the late Queen – surely the Commonwealth’s most ardent supporter – had stood on a podium in the middle of the pitch to read aloud the hand-written message she had inserted in a baton at Buckingham Palace before it was sent on its journey through all the competing nations. She declared the 2014 edition the Friendly Games. Cynical corners of social media have already dubbed these ones the Poverty Games. Last night the royal protocol fell to Charles and Camilla. Their arrival from Balmoral Castle by Tardis was a showstopper – evoking the moment Elizabeth II made her entrance at the London Olympics (or seemed to) by parachute. Changes in the political line up were evident too. Andy Burnham, four days into the PM’s job, made his first official visit to Scotland for the ceremony. Yet if the political and royal guard had evolved, the emotional spine of this ceremony remained unbroken. On the floor of the Hydro last night, the crowd found its definitive anchor in a hero who belongs to both eras. It was the then newly retired Sir Chris Hoy who bore that single Queen’s baton into Celtic Park in 2014 to a thunderous reception. Last night his return carried fresh poignancy. He was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in 2023 and given two to four years to live. He did not know if he would even live to see 2026. The man whose name graces the very velodrome built for the last Glasgow games stood before us all last night as an inspiring symbol of Scottish resilience. Perhaps the evening’s greatest structural masterstroke was the handling of the Parade of Nations within a heavily restricted floorspace. In 2014, the visual focus was tethered to a single, silver baton travelling through a long chain of hands. Team Scotland were led in by Alex Marshall, flag bearer of Scotland, alongside Sarah Adlington, baton bearer Last night all 74 nations marched onto the arena stage holding their own unique, hand-crafted batons. Every one was carved by local woodworkers at the GalGael Trust from a single fallen ash tree sourced from a couple of miles away in Pollok Park. And now the garden started to make sense. Each of their batons was planted in it, one by one, until they became a forest. The King certainly seemed impressed. He told the ceremony: ‘On Commonwealth Day last year, I placed this message into this Baton, starting a journey across the Commonwealth’s nations. ‘Over the past 500 days, the Baton Relay has been welcomed by communities with generosity and pride. Seeing the batons arrive in Scotland today, in all their colourful glory, carried by inspiring athletes and para-athletes, reminds us once again that the Commonwealth is a unique and extraordinary family of nations.’ As the teams emerged the Skye-based electronic-trad fusion group Valtos serenaded them from the garden – playing ceaselessly for the best part of an hour. Not a bad gig for a Celtic rhythm band from the isles. As we were frequently reminded, this was going out to 750million viewers world-wide. After the King opened the event, singer-songwriter Tom Walker performed international hit Leave the Light On. And then KT Tunstall entered the arena and got the crowd clapping as she started to sing one of her greatest hits, Black Horse and the Cherry Tree. Actor Sam Heughan with Nessie during the opening ceremony  In a nod to Scotland’s World Cup adventure, the 51-year-old intertwined the Tartan Army’s anthem No Scotland No Party into the track. Not too shabby a night, then, for an event which was never meant to take place in Glasgow and which was planned on the hoof with a fraction of the 2014 budget. The reality is this indoor shindig was the upshot of the Australian state of Victoria blindsiding organisers three years ago by abruptly walking away from its commitment to hosting the 2026 Games. Not until two years ago, when Glasgow stepped into the breach to host this year’s Games, was there any certainty they would outlive the Queen who had championed them throughout her reign.  In effect, the city was catching a baton dropped by another Commonwealth team member but it only agreed to do so on its own terms. Hence the shrinking of the schedule to ten core sports and the rise of the ominous phrase, the ‘scaled back games’. It spoke to a new ‘that was then, this is now’ mentality. Then we had a volunteer army of 15,000 Clydesiders, a multi-generational force recruited to act as the public face of Glasgow hospitality. They directed bewildered tourists at Central Station, marshalled stadium queues and injected a collective organic exuberance that spilled over from the venues onto the city streets. Now the volunteer force is rebranded as The Legends and the new battalion is just 3,000-strong – a lean, more tightly-focused crew tailored strictly to fit the eight-mile radius of these emergency Games. A dancer performing during the opening ceremony Reduced in numbers they may be, but they were seemingly everywhere last night. Some wore foam fingers bearing the legend Gie it Laldy. If their enthusiasm could be bottled it would make the Games a fortune. One of the most significant scale-backs, however, was entirely unplanned. In 2014, the BBC showed the Games. Now the blanket free to air coverage is gone after the Beeb lost a bidding war with subscription giant TNT Sports. Indeed, the only corner of the BBC’s output in which these Games will be visible is on the Alba channel – in Gaelic. So while last night’s ceremony was available to view on TNT and on Channel 5 as the free to air window, it was nowhere to be seen on BBC1 or BBC2 – or, for that matter, on the little- watched BBC Scotland channel. How, then, to judge this streamlined experiment from my vertiginous perch in Row Z? Organisers, with some justification, will likely spin the night as a historic victory for Scottish resourcefulness. Yet, as the house lights flicked back on, it was hard to forget that we have witnessed a profound demotion. In comparison with the sprawling carnival of Celtic Park, this indoor gathering felt too cosy for comfort. Its ideas – the teacake motif, Nessie – may have looked to some like re-treads. Dancers performing as a giant Teacake with pyrotechnics hangs from the celling That was probably the point. Glasgow is relying on existing infrastructure and organisational savvy to host the Games. It is providing a bare-minimum safety net for a 96-year-old brand that was facing extinction. If there is one person who would have looked down on those frantic, compromised efforts last night and heartily approved, it is surely the late Queen. In refusing to let the flame go out, and in performing emergency triage on the institution she championed to her final days, Glasgow did her memory proud. And remarkably, this cut-price survival strategy has already found a willing disciple. The Indian city of Ahmedabad has officially stepped into the breach to host the 2030 Centenary Games – and they have done so by buying into this exact, downsized Glasgow blueprint. The city has plucked that dropped baton off the track and run with it. It has a team-mate to pass it to in 2030. After that, who knows? Additional reporting: Dan Barker