FIDDLE-DI-DEE

It’s that time of year again. The Eurovision song contest has rolled around once more and whilst it has always seemed to be a harmless bit of fun to those of us in the “Youn-I-Ded Keengdum”, at least since I were a nipper, this year it has managed to get itself everso slightly mired in more than one controversy, not least because of the international reputation of the host country for this year’s proceedings, Azerbaijan.

The BBC’s “Panorama” programme even went to far as to upset Britain’s hopeful contestant this year, the one and only Engelbert Humperdinck (which is, bizarrely, not as rare a name as you might think…) by accosting him in their most “noble” (cough!) and “journalistic” (ugh!) way about “how he felt” about performing there, whilst simultaneously failing to realise, it would seem, that it would be the BBC itself that would be broadcasting the event the following weekend. Perhaps “Panorama” is now just another arm of the BBC Publicity machine...? After all, only this week I idly clicked on an interesting item on the descendants of Nazis and how they deal with the stigma attached to their name, and found out later that the article was linked to a television programme. I really should know better. Everything on the BBC seems to be linked to a television programme these days...

Still, you gotta just lerve those pesky journos and their blinkered focus on their story.

The Media Show on Radio 4 in the middle of the week didn’t seem to fare all that much better, to be honest, as, in its interview about the same “controversial” topic, they kept harping on about whether it was right to let Azerbaijan host the event without ever addressing the knotty problem that last year’s winner always hosts the next one, which is why the Irish government in the 1990s were seriously considering putting a contract out on Johnny Logan after they kept on accidentally winning the thing.

Okay, some of that isn’t actually true, but I bet someone thought about it...

Mind you, I am now wondering whether there are “contingency plans” just in case some natural disaster or revolution overtakes the winning country over the course of the intervening year. Is there, perhaps, a “back up plan” of asking a particular country to step in, or does the whole of Europe just look down at its shoes and pretend that nothing is happening...?

Well, it’s not as if they’ve never done that kind of thing before, is it...?

Anyway, despite their buttonholing of “The Hump”, it seems that the whole event is still going ahead, indeed, as I sit here writing this today, both of the semi-finals have taken place and I’m happy to report that the group of increasingly tiny elderly Russian ladies (do they stack inside each other when they’re not performing?) made it through despite the fact that they all seemed to be singing different songs. Although, looking again at those that did qualify, it does look as if we’re in for another evening consisting mostly of Eastern European folk singing...

Which is nice.

So I’m busily compiling this year’s score sheet for the big night on Saturday, and we will sit through twenty-six performances (because they’ve added on yet another one) of some of the most bizarre musical numbers that I am likely to hear this year, and our massively personal marking system, based on things like bonkers dancing, weird hair and bizarre clothing, will produce a clear winner who turns out to be nothing like the eventual actual winner.

In fact it could be argued that by having introduced the “semi-finals stage” (which in our house we don’t generally watch – we just happened to see the Russian ladies when we were channel surfing after “The Chelsea Flower Show”…), a lot of the “fun” and madness of the old style Eurovision Song Contest is being weeded out and so we don’t get to see it, which is a bit of a shame.

Mind you, we should also be grateful for that, otherwise we’d be sitting through forty-two acts on Saturday night, and I really don’t think that I have the tolerence.

I used to think that there wasn’t really any kind of music that I didn’t like, although some of the more “off the wall” performances in the Eurovision Song Contest do tend to test that theory almost to breaking point. I do have to admit that Reggae has never done all that much for me, to be honest, and I’m not over enamoured of the bagpipes, but I can still see that they have their place in small doses.

A lone piper at a funeral or on the battlements of Edinburgh castle can be quite moving, and I can see them working as an effective soundtrack as the haggis is delivered at a Burns’ Night supper, but apart from those specific moments, a thirty second burst is plenty for me.

I also struggle with what I call Irish “Fiddle-di-dee” music. You know the sort of thing; That Bodrun and Fiddle nonsense of the sort they always play when they go off to have a look at what the tragic Third Class passengers are up to in “Titanic” movies.

I still love a good harp, though, and the power of some of the Irish rock scene, with its blending of the traditional with the modern can be quite astonishing, just so long as there isn’t some clog-wearing idiot hopping about and they don’t overdo the solo interlude on the wretched fiddle.

It’s not as if I don’t like the violin, but in its place, being mournful and moving, amongst the wider orchestra, and not jigging about and pretending that it’s “fun”.

We really should leave that sort of nonsense to the Eurovision Song Contest.