Thank God for dishonesty. I can't have been the only Briton to shift awkwardly in their seat throughout the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games the other week. The Chinese mounted an unprecedented spectacle. Thousands of synchronised drummers, acrobats, fireworks, impossible floating rings made of electric dust (surely alien technology, that), dancers, prancers, singers and flingers. Maybe not flingers. I just threw that in to complete the rhyme. But you get the picture. It was amazing. It cost around £50m and was probably rehearsed at the shooty end of a machine gun. Dance, beloved populace! Miss three steps and we take out your kneecaps. Miss five and we go for the head. Dance till your homeland is the envy of the world! Stop weeping and dance!

Yet even as my eyes took delight in the colour and magic, my spirits sank. I'm no patriot, but I feared for our national pride come the 2012 London Olympics. How the hell are we going to top a display like that? Our plans currently consist of six roman candles, Bernie Clifton riding his ostrich, and some Britain's Got Talent prick-a-ma-boob beatboxing on a trampoline. It would be less shameful if we all marched into the arena one by one, dropped our trousers, yanked our bumcheeks apart and let the entire globe gaze right up our apertures for an hour, while the Kaiser Chiefs perform their latest single in the background. If nothing else, it would give the rest of the planet something to think about. They'd never mess with us again, that's for damn sure.

But my defeatism, for once, was misplaced. The ceremony wasn't as spectacular as it seemed. An impressive swooping aerial shot of fireworks bursting in footprint-shaped constellations turned out to be a computer-generated lie. And the cute little girl singing the Chinese anthem was only miming to the voice of another girl, whom the authorities considered too hideous to warrant airtime.

Actually, they were right. The original girl was an absolute pig, with teeth so higgledy-piggledy you could be mistaken for thinking her skull was trying to chew its way out of her face. You could possibly use her head as the basis for the lead puppet in a children's programme set in Ugly Wood, provided you didn't mind your kids vomiting in fear and disgust each time she wobbled on screen.

Oh shut up. I'm joking.

Anyway, the deception didn't end with the opening carnival, but bled into the events themselves. Hordes of volunteers, known as "cheer squads", have been been planted in the stands during under-attended events, to disguise empty seats and goad the rest of the crowd into whooping on cue.

What's remarkable about all this trickery isn't the trickery itself - but how ineptly it's been maintained. Even a six-year-old knows that once you tell a lie, you stick to it. You never admit the truth. Never. And when confronted with irrefutable evidence of your guilt, you dig your heels in further still - loudly denying reality until your accusers die of exasperation. It's a brilliant strategy that's kept the Bush administration going for years.

But the Chinese? A few timid queries and they admitted it all with a shrug. Yeah, they were computer-generated image (CGI) fireworks. Yeah, the kid was miming. Yeah, we're using cheer squads. So what? We're not arsed. Stop wetting your pants. What are you going to do about it anyway? Did you know that if we all stood up and sat down at the same time, the resulting tidal wave would destroy your capital cities? Ask us again if we're arsed. Go on. Fire away.

They didn't even try to cover it up properly before they were rumbled. The "cheer squads", for instance, were hardly subtle - they were decked out in bright yellow shirts and huddled together in conspicuous clumps. They couldn't have been more noticeable if they'd had searchlights for faces and foghorns for hands. All of which provides an effective blueprint for us to follow circa 2012. First up, the opening ceremony, in which a volcano rises from the Thames, spewing flaming Olympic rings into the night sky while Big Ben - or rather, a genetically enhanced version of Big Ben, one with straighter teeth and bigger tits - pirouettes in the background, miming to the Kaiser Chiefs' latest single. This goes on for 15 hours or until the nearest superpower threatens to bomb us. Then the events themselves begin. None of them takes place in the Olympic stadium because there is no Olympic stadium. We've not bothered building one. Instead, we've got a host of exciting made-up CGI sports. Moon Snooker! Unicorn Wrestling! Quantum Deathball! Dissenter Beheading! Pac-Man with Guns! Naturally, none of the other countries has been allowed to practice any of these games, whereas we've had four solid years to develop and perfect them. So we're guaranteed, ooh, at least three bronze medals. We'll thrash Paraguay, that's for damn sure.

And as our virtual athletes (who aren't really there) take their place on the podium (which isn't really there either), thousands of specially trained spectators will loudly voice their appreciation at gunpoint. Then we'll kick the shit out of one or two overseas journalists and claim the whole thing's been a roaring success. Again and again, till we're blue in the face. Bish bash bosh. Job done. As a twat might say at the end of a column.

· This week Charlie watched the second episode of the startling Make Me a Christian on Channel 4: "The single most infuriating broadcast of the week. And it actually makes me pity the Christians because they're so badly misrepresented."