This month Londoners indulged in a collective and sometimes ribald giggle about the logo chosen to represent the city’s role as host of the 2012 Olympics. Some said a monkey could have drawn it better. Other compared it to a broken swastika.

But not very far below the surface another question lurked: Are Londoners fit to host the games, not in the physical sense of building stadiums and transit links (although there is some doubt about that), or even running around tracks and throwing javelins (there’s doubt about that, too), but in their deepest souls?

Are Britons these days aspirational? Do they truly burn with ambition to cross the line ahead of all others? Take, for instance, a video streamed on the 2012 Olympic organising committee’s website, www.london2012.com.

Anyone watching it might have been forgiven for confusing its beginning with a television documentary about the strike-bound abyss of British despair in the 1970s that produced the three-day work week and the winter of discontent.

In the Olympic video, the viewer is introduced to a woman called Bharti. “I don’t think I’m proud of anything in particular,” she monotones. Bharti rides the bus. Bharti ponders her personal cloud of gloom. Bharti begins her Pauline conversion by riding a bicycle on the road to a park.

And, slowly, the viewer begins to realise that Bharti, like other characters in the clip, is a parable for Britain braced to emerge from the chrysalis of defeatism into the sparkling Olympic dawn, with this kind of promotion on the web playing midwife.

Lord Coe, the chairman of the 2012 committee and himself a gold medalist middle-distance runner at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games, explained the strategy this way: “We can’t sit there any longer, listening to the same old arguments that we’ve lost a whole generation to a virtual world of 24-hour multichannel entertainment.

We have to actually get into that space and use it.” Here, for instance, on the video, is Michael, a young, disabled equestrian who trades his wheelchair for a horse to ride and, he hopes, win at the 2012 Paralympics.

Finally, Bharti emerges smiling, handing a water-bottle to a racing cyclist. “Who knows what I might be doing next!” she exclaims.

There is a point to all this. If there is one dominant fear among the organisers of the games it seems to be that the cynicism of the couch-potato generation, raised on a notion of competition involving nothing more strenuous than a text-message vote to oust a contestant on reality TV, may outscore the enthusiasm required to host a great Games.

In fact, a survey by a web-based business school recently found that most people fear the Olympics will prove to be the biggest failure since the ill-fated Millennium Dome.

Even the memory of the decision to hold the Olympics here displays the ambiguity. One day after London was chosen on July 6, 2005, suicide bombers attacked the transit system and killed 52 people. The city swung from exuberance to stoic introspection.

Now, news coverage of the preparations veers between the organisers’ proclamations of triumphalist intent and dire warnings about cost overruns. Already, the Olympic budget has soared more than threefold to around $18 billion, and the overruns threaten to divert funds from more modest, local sporting projects grouped in a body called Sport England.