The Eurovision Song Contest
Tonight, millions of people across Europe – and even beyond – will be huddled in front of their TVs watching the Eurovision Song Contest. For many people, the event has become as important an annual fixture as the Cup Final, the Rose Bowl or even Christmas.
I’ll be one of them. Not because I particularly like the music – in fact I most often hate the music – but for the sheer unpredictability and predictability of the contest. The Eurovision Song Contest is unpredictable because, with very few exceptions, it’s certainly not the best song that wins. Very often it’s the song that you marked down as a complete no-hoper that sweeps up all the points, while the song you were absolutely certain would carry all before it comes nowhere at all.
On the other hand, the contest is completely predictable in many ways. For example, you can be totally certain that all of the Scandinavian countries will dutifully vote for each other, as will all the countries of former Yugoslavia; the Greeks will give maximum points to Cyprus and vice versa. Great Britain, which dominated the contest for many years when British music was still acknowledged as the coolest around, may pick up a few points from Ireland but will otherwise do very poorly. This has nothing to do with the song, and everything to do with Iraq, which isn’t even in the contest.
Similarly, you can be fairly certain that Germany will give either 10 points or 12 points to Turkey. This is not a reflection of the military alliance of the First World War or a German fondness for kebabs. It’s simply because 2.5% of the country are of Turkish ethnicity and they all vote en masse for Turkey while the Germans themselves vote for hardly anyone – Germany has won the contest only once and that was in 1982.
And then there are the French, God bless ‘em. In the early years of the Eurovision, they did quite well but they haven’t actually won it since 1977. Naturally, being French, they were a bit miffed at this and in 1980 they even pulled out of the contest completely for a few years declaring that it was “merde” or something equally Gallic. However, it has to be said that they have otherwise done their best to subvert the traditional Eurovision song, most notably in 1990 with Serge Gainsbourg’s song “White and Black Blues”. Gainsbourg should have known better really: a song about racial harmony is the last thing that’s going to win the Eurovision Song Contest (although it did come second).
So what is the typical Eurovision song? Well, it certainly isn’t “Waterloo”, which is a quality song however you look at it. As I see it, the Eurovision song is either a cheap exploitation of popular sentiment (Norway’s infamous “Brandenburger Tor” celebrating the downfall of the Berlin Wall, for example) or something mindlessly happy and bouncy (Spain’s highly complex exploration of post-modern angst “La la la” springs to mind).
In fact, it’s well-known in the music world, and outside, that there is such a thing as the “Eurovision Song” – ideally a lumpen piece of Europap that will appeal in equal measure to the inhabitants of Belgrade and Bolsover. It is rarely, if ever, a reflection of current musical tastes and cuts neatly through the problem of lyrical complexity by resorting to the sort of words that most of us left behind at the age of three. This monstrosity is usually accompanied by inane dancing and costumes left over from an amateur version of Saturday Night Fever.
As if the musical content of the Eurovision were not bad enough, we have the presenters. Traditionally these are a man and a woman who, one hopes, are in no way representative of the population of the host country. To keep the French happy, they do everything in French and English, which gives the French-speaker a chance to show off and the English-speaker an opportunity to show why he or she could never make it in stand-up comedy. In fact if there is one thing worse than the Eurovision Song, it’s the Eurovision Joke, which was probably put together by a committee in Brussels from some spare jokes left over from the Second World War.
For many years, the only real saving grace of the Eurovision was the commentary by Terry Wogan. Terry, quite clearly enjoying the hospitality thoroughly on more than one occasion, seemed to be the one person involved in the Eurovision circus who actually knew what was going on. He knew when a song was drivel (roughly 90%) and when the presenters were complete idiots (possibly 95%). In 2001, he famously endeared himself to people everywhere by accurately calling the Danish presenters “Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy”.
So why, you may ask, do I continue to watch the Eurovision Song Contest in spite of apparently detesting it? Well, I watched it as a child and loved it; I spent many years not watching it at all because it was uncool and I didn’t have a TV anyway; and in the mid-nineties I rediscovered it as the perfect kitsch entertainment that it so obviously is. It’s as much a contest as the Grand National is a boat race and the word “song” should not be taken too literally, but it remains riveting and at times hilarious entertainment. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.





























