I COMPLETELY missed the blasphemy. Did BBC1 simply cut it out of its coverage of the Olympics: Paris 2024 opening ceremony (Friday, 26 July), switching its cameras to yet another bateau mouche of rain-sodden athletes beside themselves with joy while secretly wondering how on earth to maintain peak condition as they fought off the pneumonia that would surely ensue?

Checking with the iPlayer offers me no glimpse of the drag queens presenting the alleged parody of Leonardo’s The Last Supper which has so shocked many Christians (News, 2 August); so I can’t possibly comment. But, if you’re planning to emulate the aerial ballet performed on the scaffolding surrounding Notre-Dame, I do recommend checking first with insurers.

The spectacular event was built around the River Seine, a huge procession of boats bearing each nation’s competitors, with a succession of tableaux at the various monuments along its banks, climaxing at the Eiffel Tower for the actual ceremony — no, sorry, the Olympic torch then carried all the way back to light the Olympic beacon at the Tuileries. This is exactly the kind of genius concept that, the minute that they started working out the detail, should have been quietly buried.

The Church has long experience of organising processions with key stations along the route for specific actions: we know the pitfalls — above all, that spectators, whether comfortably ensconced or, as here, soaked to the skin, will see only a fraction of the whole. You lose the essential element of focus, of a huge single crowd building, with its excitement, commitment, and momentum. Wherever you were along the river, mostly you had to focus on a huge TV screen relaying what was going on somewhere else. The best sequence was the fantastic light show based on the Eiffel Tower: a seemingly unending succession of brilliant patterns of light running up, down, and across, and projecting into the night sky. It was a beacon of welcome, illumination, and sheer delight.

Each 2024 Olympic medal contains a fragment of iron from the original Tower; this remarkable secular monument to human aspiration received the spotlight in Eiffel Tower: Building the impossible (BBC4, 29 July). This French production’s technique was seriously weird, but the brilliance, ambition, and drama of Gustave Eiffel’s achievement shone through clearly enough.

For Brits of a certain age, the French capital always promised a whiff of sexual licence. Channel 4’s Saucy! Secrets of the British sex comedy (Channel 4, 28 July) celebrated the woeful home-grown 1960s and ’70s cinematic attempts to catch up. The films reinforced our immemorial attitude: sex best expressed by coarse humour, essentially unsatisfying, as a succession of desperate women ensnared cocky but hopeless lads.