LONDON, July 28: A stirring ceremony packed with surprises, music and comedy opened the London Olympics Friday as Britain welcomed the world with a blaze of colour and creativity.

James Bond and the queen, making her film-acting debut, teamed to give London a wild Olympic opening like no other.

And creative genius Danny Boyle turned the Olympic Stadium into a juke box, cranking up world-beating rock from the Beatles, the Stones and The Who to send the planet a message: Britain, loud and proud is ready to roll.

To kick off a 17-day festival of sports, this was brilliant and cheeky.

Queen Elizabeth II playing along with movie magic from director Boyle provided the highlight of the Oscar-winner’s high-adrenaline show.

With film trickery, Boyle made it seem that Britain’s beloved 86-year-old monarch and its most famous spy parachuted into the stadium together.

Daniel Craig as 007, the queen, playing herself, and her royal corgis starred in a short movie filmed in Buckingham Palace.

“Good evening, Mr. Bond,” she said before they were shown flying by helicopter over London landmarks and then leaping — she in a salmon-coloured dress, Bond dashing as ever in a black tuxedo — into the inky night over Olympic Park.

The moment drew a huge cheer from the crowd, not used to seeing Her Majesty play such an informal part in proceedings, and coincided with a resurgence in the royal family’s popularity following the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Doubles of Bond and the queen then parachuted from a helicopter above the stadium, built on the Olympic Park in a once derelict area of London’s East End, before schoolchildren sang the national anthem and the Union flag was raised.

Boyle sprang another giant surprise by giving seven teenage athletes the supreme honour of igniting the Olympic cauldron.

Together, they touched flaming torches to trumpet-like tubes that spread into a ring of fire and then joined elegantly to form the cauldron.

With a singalong of “Hey Jude,” Beatle Paul McCartney closed the spectacle that ran 45 minutes beyond its scheduled three hours.

Organisers said the cauldron would be moved Sunday night to the corner of the stadium where a giant bell tolled during the show.

The show never caught its breath with a nonstop rock and pop homage to cool Britannia. The soundtrack veered from classical to irreverent.

The evening started with fighter jets streaming red, white and blue smoke and roaring over the stadium, packed with a buzzing crowd of 60,000 people, at 8:12 pm.

The ceremony, inspired by Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, began with Britain’s first Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins ringing a giant 23-tonne Olympic bell.

Played out before world leaders, European royalty and dignitaries including US First Lady Michelle Obama, the show switched to the playful recreation of an English rural idyll with grassy meadows, fences, a water mill and maypoles.

But the rural idyll gave way to industrial revolution smoke stacks as actor Kenneth Branagh, dressed as 19th century engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, read the “Isles of Wonder” speech from William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”.

Fireworks cascaded from giant Olympic rings before the comedy sketch featuring Bond and the Queen.

A deaf children’s choir evocatively sang the British national anthem in their pyjamas and 600 real-life health workers took part in dance routines celebrating the free British health service.

Comedian Rowan Atkinson, adopting the globally recognised character of mischievous Mr Bean, brought the house down as he joined the London Symphony Orchestra playing a single note throughout the score of the Olympic film “Chariots of Fire”.

The final act, starring hundreds of young nightclubbing dancers, was a breathless journey through popular British culture over the last five decades featuring music from everyone from the Sex Pistols to Queen and the Jam to the Who.

Sitting at a computer outside a small house on stage was Tim Berners-Lee, the Londoner who invented the worldwide web and enabled the explosion of social networking that is playing a major part at the London Games.

Mid-ceremony he tweeted to his almost 83,000 followers “This is for everyone” which also projected across the spectators.

Next came the parade of athletes, with the Greek team keeping up Olympic tradition and leading out thousands of competitors dressed in colourful national costumes.

They marched around the stadium in double-quick time, urged on by the up-tempo beats of the Bee Gees band and others. The world’s fastest man Usain Bolt strode confidently with the Jamaican flag while playing up to cameras and cheering fans.

Arctic Monkeys performed under booming fireworks and in front of a troupe of winged cyclists before Games chief Sebastian Coe addressed the hushed crowd.

“London 2012 will inspire a generation ... This is our time. And one day we will tell our children and our grandchildren that when our time came, we did it right,” said Coe.

The parade of nations featured most of the roughly 10,500 athletes — some planned to stay away to save their strength for competition — marching behind the flags of the 204 nations taking part.

Britain, dressed in white and gold and hoping to repeat its medals success of Beijing in 2008, entered last to thunderous roars and the thumping strains of David Bowie’s lyrics “We Can Be Heroes” as ticker tape floated down from the roof.

Bahrain and Brunei featured female flag-bearers in what has been called the Olympics’ Year of the Woman. For the first time at the games, each national delegation includes women, and a record 45 percent of the athletes are women. Three Saudi women marching behind the men in their delegation flashed victory signs with their fingers.

“This is a major boost for gender equality,” said the International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, overseeing his last games as head of the IOC before he steps down in 2013.

Rogge honoured the “great, sports-loving country” of Britain as “the birthplace of modern sport,” and he appealed to the thousands of athletes assembled before him for fair play.

“I declare open the Games of London celebrating the 30th Olympiad of the modern era,” said Queen Elizabeth, followed by a fanfare and explosion of fireworks.

Former world heavyweight champion and 1960 Rome Olympic gold medalist Muhammad Ali was cheered when he appeared briefly with his wife, Lonnie, before the Olympic flag was unfurled.

The Olympic torch, ending an 8,000-mile odyssey across the country, was driven in a speedboat up the River Thames by former England football captain David Beckham and handed to Britain’s most successful Olympian Steve Redgrave.

He then passed it on to seven youngsters — Callum Airlie, Jordan Duckitt, Desiree Henry, Katie Kirk, Cameron MacRitchie, Aidan Reynolds and Adel who lit a fire on the stadium floor which spread and rose to form a raised pyre of more than 200 torches combining as a single giant flame. —Agencies