Beijing 2008 – a hard act to follow?
By Adrian Warner, BBC London's Olympics correspondent
London 2012 and the Government will have one simple message when the world turns its attention to the Beijing Olympics this year – "Size isn't everything."
When I travelled to China with the Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell in November, she was keen to stress that London's Games will be very different from the spectacular show we can expect next summer.
With Beijing's 'bird's nest' stadium peering out of the smog on a bitterly cold winter morning, Ms Jowell said: "This is probably the last Olympic stadium we're going to see on this kind of scale."
The buzzword for the London 2012 stadium is 'functional' – hardly the vocabulary of the West End. China wants to drive a sparkling sports car into the Olympic world. Britain appears happier to turn up with a more practical estate – a much greener hybrid vehicle.
The comparisons with China are nevertheless important and that is why BBC London went to Beijing with Ms Jowell on her five-day trip.
We ran a report every night for four nights on both our 6.30pm and 10.30pm TV programmes, looking at what London can learn from the Chinese experience.
We broke a key security story about plans to set up Britain's first ever permanent command centre for the Games, which will bring together police across the country, the emergency services, the military, the Government and the intelligence services. The new mission control, to be built in London, will remain after the Games to handle national and international emergencies. This came out of an exclusive interview in Beijing with the Metropolitan Police's Olympic security chief Richard Bryan.
In other films we compared the environmental challenges facing London and Beijing, including the smog in the Chinese capital which is going to be a major problem for athletes. We analysed the different approaches that the UK and China are taking towards the Games in terms of the size of venues and politics.
And on the last day of the trip we visited a pensioners' group eagerly learning English for the Games. This is a generation which was only offered Russian at school in the 1950s under Mao. Pensioners often make up a sizeable contingent of volunteers at the Games, and it will be interesting to see how many over-60s will get to participate in London's programme. As far as these 70-year-old Chinese were concerned, the Olympics are certainly not just for the youth of the world.
During the trip I also reported live for BBC London 94.9FM and wrote a piece for the BBC London website which was linked to our packages.
China is, of course, using the Olympics as a huge advertisement for its return to the global stage as an economic power. Britain has different priorities. But there is still a lot at stake and both cities have to make sure everything goes right on the night.
Beijing is going to be a hard act for London to follow in terms of a show. The Chinese are spending £20billion on their Olympic project, more than twice as much as the UK. It's going to be fascinating to see how the organisers of London 2012 react to the Games we are going to experience in August.
Adrian Warner has covered 10 Olympics since 1988 for Reuters and the Evening Standard and last year won the UK's Sports News Reporter of the Year award. He joined BBC London as Olympics Correspondent last May.
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