Britain acknowledges the pastoral, but mostly as past

Everyone's talking today about the eclectic opening ceremony for the London Olympics.  The New York Times coverage featured the headline, "A Five-Ring Opening Circus, Weirdly and Unabashedly British."  It offered this description of the hodgepodge:

The noisy, busy, witty, dizzying production somehow managed to feature a flock of sheep (plus a busy sheepdog), the Sex Pistols, Lord Voldemort, the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a suggestion that the Olympic rings were forged by British foundries during the Industrial revolution, the seminal Partridge Family Reference from "Four Weddings and a Funeral," a group of people dressed like members of Sgt. Pepper's band, some rustic hovels tended by rustic peasants, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and, in a paean to the National Health Service, a zany bunch of dancing nurses and bouncing sick children on huge hospital beds.

Here's an excerpt from a NY Times blog--prior to the opening ceremony--explaining organizer Danny Boyle's thinking about the inclusion of the sheep:

[Boyle] has promised it will include horses, chicken and sheep in a ceremonial nod to Britain's rural expanses.

So, London--and Britain--did not forget its rural other, but did it acknowledge them primarily in the past tense?