The final preparations are being made for today's opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris. This is the scene live in the French capital this morning in the Olympic city. Today's opening ceremony will see athletes and dignitaries carried down the River Seine on a fletilla of boats in front of around 300,000 spectators. On the eve of the Games, the French President Emmanuel Macron promised world leaders it would be one of the most incredible ceremonies. Security is tight, with half of the Seine now hidden behind fences and checkpoints. Let's speak to our Paris correspondent, Huw Schofield. Hugh, we're only a few hours away from the opening. We've heard it's going to be a spectacular event. What are you seeing and what should we expect?

Well, I can't give you any details because I don't know the details. It has all been kept under wraps, and there are to be surprises, we're told. Hints have come out and we know the rough format. The rough format, as you say, will be this flotilla of boats carrying about 7,000 athletes down the River Seine from upstream at the Pont d'Orsay, to leads down to Pontdiennes, near the Eiffel Tower. En route, they will be regaled, as will millions and millions of TV viewers around the world, by a series of tableaux put on by dancers and actors on the banks of the River Seine, and in some cases, I think on little islands that have been set up in the River Seine, evoking, well, we're not quite sure what. I suppose evoking sense of place because it goes past all these amazing places like Notre-Dame, the Bastille, the Eiffel Tower and so on. But what the overarching theme will be, we're not sure. The director, a man called Thomas Joli, has said he doesn't want it to be a classic historical pageant, evoking all the great moments of French history, but something more modern and more inclusive.

We'll have to see. Then at the end, there'll be a big concert at the Trocadéro, which is where all the dignitaries are going to be. There, the headline seems to be Céline Dion and Lady Gaga and Aya Nakamura. But again, the lineup hasn't been confirmed. I'm just slightly guessing there.

The idea of a show of this magnitude in a city that's under its highest terrorism alert. It seems quite risky, doesn't it? What security precautions are in place?

Well, the place is flooded with police and soldiers. The idea was formed several years ago, but when the terrorist threat was already there. They came into this knowing that security was going to be, from the very beginning, one of the biggest problems with this. They had to scale down their ambitions because initially they were talking about 600,000 people on the banks. Now, it were down to half that, 300,000, because they realized that it was too much of a challenge. But even with that, it's been a massive operation sealing off the center of the city along the river, the barricades everywhere, these fences everywhere. The city of Paris has emptied, really. People aren't going anywhere near that area and haven't been for the last week or two. Of course, there will be then the people arriving this evening. The hope is that that will then kick off a period in which fans start investing the city again and come in and enjoying all the facilities. But right now, in the last few days, the city has felt very, very dead, surprisingly dead. That's largely because of the security and largely, I think, because of the way all the pronouncements about the difficulties of travel and so on have put people off coming in.

Well, we're very much looking to watching the opening ceremony here here. Thank you so much for joining us.