North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

For Crying Out Loud

A number of circumstances meant that I spent Saturday night babysitting the whirlwind that is my 20 month old niece (after which I'm amazed Lilymom has time to read a blog, let alone write one). I mention this only to explain why I happened to see some of the Eurovision song contest.

If you were to choose a group of people to represent your country, who would you choose. Politicians ? Artist ? Sportsmen and women? How about your Eurovision entry? Or what about the people who are sad enough to watch the whole thing, and then rush to the phone to vote for one of the songs?

The Eurovision was set up as an experiment by the European Broadcasting Union (not to be confused with these guys), who wanted to show that the various national broadcasters could overcome the technical challenges required to organise a multinational, simultaneous, live broadcast (Hey, that was a big deal back in the Sixties).

Now, I'm sure that the engineers of Europe had a high-minded purpose in mind when planning this broadcast the first time. In case of emergency, vital information could be broadcast right across Europe. Imagine if the Russians had invaded, or Martians landed?

Imagine how useful this broadcasting capability would be. Alas, no such reason ever presented itself. Instead, they were reduced to having a song contest, just to show how erm….useful…and necessary… their system was. It's a bit like the third generation mobile phones, which can provide portable broadcast right across the world. Except that there's only one use for that. Broadcasting sport and porn in a manner that you could probably hide from your wife.

It has become de rigeur for Irish and UK to cover the Eurovision with a "we're above all this", "aren't the rest of Europe bonkers?" air. There is only one flaw with this approach. Picking Marty Whelan and Terry Wogan respectively as commentators, who themselves are beyond parody. Stitch them together with the same wig, I say.

That is not to say that the Eurovision is undeserving of derision. The joke is already on Ireland since RTE spent the whole year picking first the entrant and then the song (which was still shit).Our licence fee at work. Alas, Mickey Joe Harte was beaten into eleventh place, though as Marty breathlessly informed us, that was enough to ensure that Ireland would qualify to compete next year. Listening to the Eurodrivel on offer, you wouldn't think that there are countries every year that aren't allowed compete due to even less talent.

Every year, there is at least one entrant that is so bad, so unbelievably embarrassing that the real question is why the border police in the home country didn't stop him or her leaving, just to stop them mortifying their fellow citizens. This year was a vintage year. The Polish entry featured a man with purple hair who decided to sing his dirge in Polish, German, Russian and maybe Esperanto. It would have been shit in even one language. Hang on a minute, I thought the Poles had spent the last century struggling to ensure they didn't have to speak German or Russian any more?

The Ukrainians went one better, by deciding to have a performing contortionist in a blue leotard on a turntable beside the band. And no, she didn't sing. As the lead singer reached the emotional crescendo of the song, I doubt if I was the only one distracted by watching the blue-clad young lady unfurl her legs from behind her ears.

The United Kingdom adopted a unique approach. The rather sexy young Kylie lookalike sang the first verse of her song completely off key and was rewarded by the population of Europe by scoring nul point (Sky News ran a survey this morning -was this the worst Eurovision performance ever ?). By the way, the mystery of what Leisure Suit Larry did after he escaped from the land of Lounge Lizards was solved last night - he was performing the Cyprus entry.

In a nail-biting finish, a bunch of Turkish belly-dancers won. Marty was holding out for a Russian win in the last round (the faux teenage lesbians Tatu trying their hand, as it were), blithely ignoring the fact that there was only 12 points left to score and Tatu were 15 points behind.

One mystery remains unsolved. During the scoring process, the broadcast would cut to an announcer in each participant country, who was usually super-imposed in front of a picture from the city from which they were broadcasting. When the Israeli presenter announced her country's votes in front of a non-descript scene, I thought, "Fair enough, they probably wanted to pick a non-controversial view". By the time they had eliminated anything that would annoy Jews, Christians, Muslims and anyone else, all they were left was a street lamp and an office building. But then it was the same for Greece (hmm, where could one find a nice backdrop in Athens?) and a number of other countries. Then I began to wonder. Maybe the Engineers were choosing pictures of the buildings from which they were broadcasting. Dear God. They must be stopped.

Posted by Monasette at May 25, 2003 11:38 PM