We watched the Eurovision Song Contest last night. It was the first time I'd seen it in I don't know how many years. Looking at the list of past UK entries on Wikipedia, the last one I have a positive memory of hearing was Lynsey de Paul and Mike Moran's Rock Bottom, and that was in 1977. I have a sort of vague recollection of a media furore in the year when the UK act was hopelessly out of key, but it turns out that that was eleven years ago. I shouldn't laugh, the duo scored nul points, were dropped by their record company, had their album pulled, and split up. How fickle is fate and the quest for fame.
We were only two out of a hundred and eighty million people around the globe who watched it, so were in good or at least plentiful company, but were probably justified in our decision not to bother to pick up the phone and vote for any of the acts. I wouldn't have known who to vote for anyway, I found the whole thing so odd. Was I supposed to root for the best musical effort (in which case the field would narrow down considerably) or the act that most entered into the spirit of Eurovision?
Why exactly was a man running on the spot in a giant hamster wheel while his female compatriot belted out a song? Why did the anxious young man who looked like a younger and thinner version of Ed Miliband wearing an Eastern European assassin's coat score so many points? Why was one act accompanied by a woman in red trousers swinging on a trapeze? And why, oh why were the Greeks bouncing on a trampoline, accompanied by a gymnast? Or the Russian twins performing with their hair tied together, standing on a giant see saw, and wearing melon coloured dressing gowns so hideous you felt their costume designer must have been a closet Ukrainian nationalist?
I was sorry the Icelanders didn't score a few more points. I quite liked their song, in a noisy, retro way, though I'd have been bored stiff by it if I had to listen to it more than about five times, but I really liked their act. The coloured suits were great, and their puppyish enthusiasm, and the intriguing claim by Graham Norton that one of them was an MP. When you looked at them, they were all clearly too old to be jumping up and down in garish telly tubby themed suits, and I had a beautiful vision that in their day jobs they must all be accountants and lawyers.
There should have been a prize for best dancing, so that the Danes could have won it. The Danish dancing was so good, it put all the earlier efforts in the shade. The French do not really get pop music, we decided. I don't know what the Germans thought they were doing, but somebody should have stopped it. I thought the Norwegian contestant should have stuck to carpentry, and the Swedish power balladeer blonde was just very, very dull. The Swiss might have been good, if they had stopped mucking about and cut out the whistling. The Maltese entry was quite good, but not good enough to make me want to buy their latest album as an import, or even to check whether they have any albums.
The Dutch entry came as a surprise after all that had gone before. I rather like country music, without having any, beyond Lyle Lovett, and a Kenny Rogers CD won as a raffle prize about fifteen years ago and still not taken out of its plastic wrapper. I sometimes listen to the R2 Thursday night country music programme, and find myself enjoying the guitar intros, and then not liking the vocals. However, I liked the Dutch song all the way through, a model of restrained economy. I could imagine that if I had the album I would still be playing it occasionally in a decade's time, if the rest of it was in the same mould as their Eurovision entry. I was even more surprised when the judges liked it as well, and it came second.
Beaten by the bearded lady, but who could grudge her the victory? I thought it was a very encouraging marker for progress towards equal rights, and that gold dress and belting power ballad were certainly in the spirit of Eurovision. I won't be buying the album, but well done her. As to why the female member of the host team was dressed in a nude coloured fairy costume, and wandering about during the hiatus while the votes were counted offering food from home to random contestants, I couldn't tell you. Or who any of the hosts were, or why one of them kept talking about China. Still, it was good fun. We might even watch it again next year. It forms a nice seasonal counterbalance to The Last Night of the Proms.
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