Charge on car attack

A man has been charged with vehicle damage after footage emerged of someone punching the windscreen of a moving car in Leicester.

Michael McCabe, 37, has been charged with racially aggravated criminal damage, three counts of damage to motor vehicles and resisting arrest on Thursday.

He was due to appear at Leicester Magistrates’ Court yesterday.

The viewer is also given a look at the politics that were involved in the show, the battles that had to be fought and won with the government.

Boyle, writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce and other core members of the London 2012 team remember how the note came down from the then Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt that he was concerned that the show was running too long.

The section he suggested cutting? Surprise, surprise, it was the now iconic NHS routine featuring hundreds of hospital beds and dancing nurses. (Well, why would a man soon to become the first Health Secretary absolutely devoted to dismantling the NHS want to celebrate it?)

Boyle said that if the routine was cut, he would walk, taking all the extras with him. The bit stayed. (Of course, Hunt steadfastly denied that he ever asked for the cut. I know who I’m inclined to believe here.)

There were also misgivings from the powers that be about the “typical British house” in the Saturday Night sequence of the ceremony. If you recall, it showed a bunch of British teens having a Saturday night on the town, while simultaneously taking us through an exploration of British music, fashion and culture from the 1960s until the present day.

But what, some wanted to know, did a little Barratt-style home have to do with anything? They said it looked “stupid”. Well, as Cottrell-Boyce explained, the bedrooms in those little houses up and down Britain are where teenagers dream and grow. Where they strum guitars and sing into hairbrushes in front of the mirror. They are the crucibles in which the next Paul McCartneys and David Bowies and Kate Bushes and Dizzee Rascals are formed. They are, he said, “the factories” of British creativity.

All of this was already enough to put a lump in my throat but the moment that really pushed me over the edge was something I’d completely forgotten about – the HMS Windrush sequence.

The Windrush was the ship that brought the first Caribbeans to Britain in the late 1940s. How could I have forgotten that Boyle’s astonishingly brave production