A TOUR OF THE ARCHIVE WITH FRANK COTTRELL BOYCE Frank Cottrell Boyce, children's author and film-maker

“ I had the great joy of being part of the creative team for the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics - a multi-media extravaganza that was streamed, tweeted, favourited and blogged about across the planet. For all its noise and technological innovation, the show was nourished from its earliest stages on the quietest and most ancient of art forms - poetry. We worked for the first year in a little room in Soho which we plastered with pictures and poems. The show opened with Caliban's extraordinarily beautiful speech from The Tempest, and with the equally haunting "found poem" - the Shipping Forecast - both spoken over a tableau inspired by Blake's 'The Echoing Green'. The song that ushered in the Olympic torch used Auden's phrase "affirming flame" to describe the beautiful Thomas Heatherwick cauldron. The official programme doubles as a poetry anthology - with its selections from Carol Ann Duffy, Milton, and from Heaney's 'The Cure at Troy' - which became a kind of manifesto for us. From time to time while we were mooching and thinking, I would turn to the Poetry Archive search engine to look for new ideas, new voices, to freshen our perception. ”