Olympic closing ceremony: a celebration of the flippant, fatuous and irrelevant

It is just so sad that (formerly) Great Britain has been lowered to the extent that the only things seen as worthy of celebration is pop music and fashion. How anything useful can come of any of it eludes me completely. Foreigners will be left with a lasting impression of Britain as a kind of trippy hippy wonderworld populated by dead pop stars and annorexic clothes horses.
The bizarre show started with a presentation of a London traffic jam wrapped in newsprint while workmen suspended on wires were beating on iconic features of the London skyline. The normally delightful Timothy Spall sprang jack-in-the-box style from the top of Big Ben and recited Shakespeare as Winston Churchill - badly.

And it got worse. Particular lowlights included:
A scene featuring street cleaners and bin men that seemed to be recalling the London riots of last year.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan in orange hoods riding on bicycles.
Annie Lennox looking like the Bride of Dracula (and sounding like her too) in a ship full of dancing zombies.
The truly horrible Russell Brand giving the nod to the British porn industry.
The Spice Girls performing (if that is the word) from the tops of London cabs. How did they get so many cabs south of the river at that time of night?
Some singer called Elbow, of whom I've never heard, who looked and sounded a bit like Chas minus Dave or Dave minus Chas.
George Michael who appeared as if fresh from the public lavatories on Hampstead Heath.
And the utterly talentless Fat Boy Slim whose repetitious rubbish reminded me of why I hate DJs so much.
I did, however, like the nuns on rollerskates which were some kind of reference to The Life Of Brian.
It must also be said that the lighting effects and the fireworks were breathtakingly good.
Overall I wonder what it looked like from Mars and perhaps Mars would have been the best place from which to have viewed it.