Triumph, despair, glory and struggle: the Olympic Games might technically be a sporting event, but in spirit and essence they are pure drama. Film-makers may have shouted loudest about this discovery, generating hit after Olympic-themed hit throughout the 20^th century, but composers also know a thing or two about sporting thrills, with almost 300 years of Olympic action in the opera house.

Alan Ayckbourn refuses to write down to children, and it shows. The Boy Who Fell into a Book is as sophisticated in structure as it is family-friendly in content. The narrative follows nine-year-old Kevin, who is absorbed (literally) into the detective story he is reading: Rockfist and the Green Shark.

Though this 1966 comedy was a light and fluffy thing, it was gazed upon benignly by the critics, mostly because it was a late vehicle for the well-oiled Cary Grant charm machine. It proved to be his last film, in fact. Others viewed it equally fondly because it contained scenes of Grant in his boxer shorts, a challenge he tackled with panache despite his 62 years.

When we think of the 1972 Olympics in Munich, we do not think of US swimmer Mark Spitz’s record-breaking seven gold medals, or Finland’s Lasse Virén making his extraordinary comeback from a fall in the 10,000 metres to a record-breaking win. No, the 1972 Olympics will always be remembered for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes (and coaches) by Palestine’s Black September organisation. Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich takes this act, portrayed in a gripping opening sequence, as its starting point.

It was Lenin who realised early in the Russian Revolution that “of all the arts, film is for us the most important” and Hitler and Goebbels perceived the immense propaganda potential of the Olympics through the medium of film. The 1936 Olympic Games took place in Berlin a few months after Hitler’s armies occupied the Rhineland. Hitler spared no expense in making it the best organised and most efficiently equipped in the history of the Olympics.

Making fictional movies about sport is the devil's own job. They generally don't appeal to non fans while those who follow the game in question spend their time mocking the action scenes as actors pretending to be sportsmen and women usually fail to convince - as is the case with the stars of Wimbledon (2004) and Match Point (2005).

Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and football have long been secret lovers backstage. But they have only been rarely seen out together in public.

In the original Games featuring Athenians and Spartans and the like, they would of course have done it all in the buff. The sporting costume – the thin end of the wedge that is the singlet - was a tawdry Olympic neologism foisted on the pure ideals of the athletic contest in the first modern Olympiad in 1896. Just what naked wrestling would have looked like is of course something one has to imagine - dreamily or otherwise. Alternatively, of course, you can have another peep at Ken Russell’s Women in Love.

It all starts so promisingly; film-maker Andrew Kötting and writer Ian Sinclair “liberate” a swan pedallo from its moorings in Hastings to launch it into the sea. Naming the absurd craft “Edith” after King Harold’s mistress Edith Swan-neck, they plan to pedal the vessel 160 miles from Hastings to Hackney via the rivers of Kent and the Thames, finally ending up at the site of the Olympic Games.

"What caused him to be so fast? Is he here for a purpose?" wondered Usain Bolt's father, Wellesley, in a mystical tone. Usain's mother, Jennifer, also seems to detect the workings of a higher power in her son's blindingly rapid progress around the world's running tracks. "Thank you, Lord, for what you have done," she said.