EUROVISION SONG CONTEST 2014 - THE FINAL

In the end, whilst the winning number wasn’t exactly my cup of cocoa, the popular choice (at least in the arena) won, and justice of a sort was seen to be done as Europe embraced a new tolerance and moved forward into embracing a far more unified world where a bearded transvestite actually means something of significance.

Or something.

Personally, I much preferred the country and western-style number from the Netherlands, but that probably just shows that I’m getting old. These days I still crave a “no gimmicks” performance by a bloody good band giving a bloody good professional performance, and am easily bored by bland pap dressed up in bangs and whistles, but occasionally that still happens, and when it does, you know that you’re on to something a bit special, even if the rest of the world is being distracted by smoke and mirrors and a thousand-and-one other nonsenses.

My usual criteria is whether you’ll still be whistling it in two month’s time, but, again, the “Whistle Test” is an old-fashioned point of view to have.

Because, as you can probably tell by now, with all the usual glitz and glamour, and the familiar vague sense of personal self-disdain that comes with knowing that you’ve been sucked in to one of life’s less worthwhile wastes of time, Saturday night rolled around and, at eight o’clock “YooKay” time, the latest Eurovision Song Contest kicked off with its spirit of European peace and harmony taking a bit of a denting from events happening on the Russian borders.

But the madness that is the Eurovision Song Contest inevitably rolls on, and that one Saturday evening of the year which I devote to it, despite spending so much of my energy avoiding other, perhaps more popular Saturday night fayre, found me settling down, pencil poised, with good cheese, fine wine, the very best company, a bowl of cheese balls, and the latest in a series of custom-made scorecards (which turned out to be slightly out of date but pulled a healthy bit of blog interest with me unworthily getting my first ever “1000 page view” day…) to sit through some of the oddest tunes that Europe has to offer, being belted out in strangely muted HD sound.

Most, of course, I’d already seen once during this week’s heats, so it wasn’t quite as surprising an evening as it’s sometimes been, but the occasional surprise was pulled out of the bag. After all, when you find yourself really liking a bonkers little performance of a song you’ve never heard before called “Moustache” sung in French by the French, you know that your mind has quite possibly jumped a rail or three.

Still, the arenas are getting far more impressive, even when custom-built in a shipyard, the opening flag dance and interval performances and silly little films were as over the top as ever, and the natty but brief little slogan “Join Us” spoke to the TwitWorld generation, but, generally, the evening did not engage with me like it once did, even though, with the amount of pre-broadcast downloads and CDs available, the audience in the arena seemed to already know all of the words and sang along with many of the tunes giving a more “stadium” feel to the whole thing which I, of course, would find quite ghastly if I had to be there.

There was also a moment of confetti-based “comedy vengeance” when our national commentator, Graham Norton, made a brief Europe-wide cameo, presumably because of being famous for his biting sarcasm, although earlier on, as I walked back into the room, he seemed to be having a directly-fed conversation with my Beloved about Lou Reed, which was slightly surreal.

The result aside, otherwise the voting system got up to most of its usual tricks as we settled back expecting the UK to languish near the bottom again: Russia got roundly booed due to the politics of the times, but still rounded up a healthy glut of votes; Poland’s advertisement for the kind of girls that still seem to occasionally be desperate to meet me via my spam folder didn't seem to have quite the expected pull; and the UK came a modest 17th. Meanwhile, the Beloved was blissfully happy that her favourite won, but then she’s always been a sucker for the odd transvestite.

Our own scoring system seems to have become slightly skewed, too, because it’s based upon the bonkers madness of yesteryear when wild clothing, bizarre hairstyles and cra-zee songs were more common than they now appear to be, so we end up marking highly for songs that are no-hopers, and have to mark down stuff that we, in as far as these things matter, find quite likeable.

I don’t know, perhaps some kind of redesign is needed although I’ll probably end up forgetting all about it again for 51 weeks and end up revamping the old one again for the fourteenth time at some godawful time of the morning next year.

If Europe survives that long that is.