RANDOM EUROVISION JOTTINGS

A few random jottings made between mouthfuls of wine (a rather decent Sicilian Red, if you must know…) and cheese whilst watching last night’s “Eurovision Song Contest” in Düsseldorf, presented here in no particular order.

A drinking game involving a shot of blue vodka every time a pyrotechnic goes off on stage… Italy return after 14 years away… Is he a kind of German Phil Collins?... The blue union jack is a work of graphic genius… I always start off scoring low because of the system… Way too many tattoos on display… They must have used vats of hair gel this year… “He looks like a nice boy who’s fallen in with a wrong lot…” (Norton)…  That sounds like Father Dick Byrne’s song from “Father Ted”…

That’s a “Rover” Balloon!... A nice bit of cool jazz, I like that… He’s a kind of Bosnian Bez, isn’t he?... I think I may just have seen a bloke in a backless shirt (shudders)… “How do you become a good sand artist? Live in a filthy house?” (Norton) - I don’t know, but it’s certainly impressive… He’s in a glass box. Now he’s smashed his way out of it… Jackets with lamps in… Jedward look like very camp Dominators (very obscure Patrick Troughton allusion there)… That Slovenian song has a kind of instant familiarity about it, don’t you think?…

Oh look he rather optimistically shouted “Everybody!”… You’ve got to admire France, they will stick to singing in French. Oh, he sang it in Corsican… The “Throbbing Tonsil” (Norton)… That will be very popular in the bars of Spain this summer… More bland Europop – I bet that does well… A tale of heartbreak from Iceland… Well that’s brave thing to do - sing it acapella - and she’s only twenty… Oh! Get a room will you?... The Ronettes live again… They’re putting the subliminal message fix in by only talking to them… I’m always impressed by the sheer speed of those set changes…

Fashion did seem to play a large art in the proceedings: There’s no money in Greece, but they threw those jackets away… He looks like a rather smug blond Fonz… Ooh! “Get you!”… You can’t do much better than Coneheads, Horns and a woman on a unicycle… Waistcoats and jeans???... Stripy trousers with ‘Barber Shop Quartet Chic ’ look… She’s got a “Purdey” cut… Rappers and acrobats… Another sight of the now ubiquitous little black glittery dress… I hope she (another pneumatic blonde) doesn’t have a wardrobe malfunction wearing that. Well, it would be a Eurovision first… Blonde girls in floaty outfits standing in front of wind machines is always a winning combination… That’s basically a string dress and thigh length boots, but I kind of like it…  They’ve got those old “Hole In The Wall” outfits on!... “With 125 million people watching, I might have decided to wear decent tights…” (Norton).

The choice of untraditional interval entertainment caused a bit of a stir, despite the incredibly impressive staging of the whole event, presenting Jan Delay or ‘The Blues Brothers meets the test card’, well… it’s no Riverdance is it? No, I suppose not, but it was probably comparatively cheap and, well, you can’t really have massed German dancers traditionally goose-stepping all over the stage, can you?... “Tear down this wall” – they’re quoting Reagan now?... That bloke in the crowd looks like a slightly embarrassed bank manager. Maybe he is… That Green Room looks like something out of “Star Wars”. Yeah but not good Star Wars… Oh yes, people are prepared to forgive Germany but not us… “You know nothing, Norton!” (he always seems to dismiss the stuff I quite like).

Putting on the subtitles (and on HD even the subtitles seem pretty good in comparison to the hit and miss stuff we used to get) whenever a song is being sung in a language you don’t have brings up some interesting lyrics: “But someone hit me and I fell into your heart, my dear…”; “Pay for the hopeless despair…”; “I am lame, a psycho in the brain…”, and there was a major (and much welcomed) return of the “Na na na”, the “Da Da Dum” and the “Ouo Ou Ou Ou Ouo” style of lyric this year, too.

Well at least someone liked the UK this year, and they were (briefly) top of the leader board, although the cynics in the room (i.e. me) pointed out that having both the Olympics and Eurovision during the same year might just bankrupt the country. Look what having both over two years did to Greece…

By all the eccentric scoring systems we use in our house, either Jedward from Ireland singing “Lipstick” or Eldrine from Georgia singing “One More Day” should have romped home, and yet… they didn’t. Strangely, and just to prove that this bizarre little system does actually kind of work sometimes, both ended up quite highly placed, so… yay!

In the end, after all the “primly” and not so primly dressed presenters (those in “Showbiz dungarees” – Norton) across 43 countries had read out their points to a waiting and weary world, including the customary twelve point maximum for Greece from Cyprus, Azerbaijan walked it with a bland little ditty called “Running Scared” sung by a mother of two who currently lives in London (so – in the completely non-partisan way possible - the UK had a tenuous connection there, so…yay!). The UK itself had a decent enough mid-table finish and scored ten times as many points as last year, so maybe people are beginning to learn how to dislike this country a bit less.