Eurovision

I am on a TV binge tonight, So You Think You Can Dance (dancing talent show), Doctor Who, and now the Eurovision Song Contest. Eurovision is one of the stranger cultural manifestations of life in Europe. Held annually since 1956, singers and groups from across the continent (loosely speaking - quite how they manage to include Israel in Europe baffles me!) compete in a televised song-a-thon. An extraordinarily strange song-a-thon.

Back in the sixties and seventies Eurovision attracted high quality entries and produced some classic songs and acts. For example, Abba first hit the big time after winning Eurovision with Waterloo. Since then the quality has declined and the weirdness level increased. Most people in the UK now watch because it has a fascination of the horrible rather than in any expectation of hearing good music. At its best, it produces catchy, jingly songs and the occasional tuneful ballad. As for the rest ... well! Right now I am watching a Greek singer who started with something sort of rappish before morphing into a ballad ... ooh! now back to the rap bit again, with a group of male dancers / acrobats in the background ... and more ballad, with the dancers in statuesque poses ... morphed again to Greek folk music with Greek dancing. Phew! Finished. I think he was running out of genres. It has been worse. The group from Bosnia-Herzegovina included a triangle playing double bassist. Indescribable. Believe it or not, there has already been a semi-final stage, and only the "best" 25 have made it to the final.

Equally strange is the voting system, which merges national phone votes with the votes of professional juries into a dogs dinner of national prejudice. Countries cannot vote for themselves but tend to vote by blocks, so the Scandinavians vote for each other, as do the Balkans and the former USSR block. The UK and Ireland vote for each other, but as very few other European countries will vote for the British, the chance of the UK ever winning again is more or less zero. Ireland this year has thoroughly entered into the spirit of the thing by fielding teenage twins Jedward (a conflation of James and Edward) who reached the final stages of the British X Factor competition a couple of years ago, whose limited talent and lack of ability to sing in tune was somehow outweighed by their bouncy enthusiasm and over the top routines. For their Eurovision entry they were wearing giant shoulder pads, with blonde, vertical, Troll-style hair and singing almost in tune.

To add to the overall effect, the contest is being held in Dusseldorf, Germany, with presenters whose humour is heavy handedly Germanic (and I mean heavy handed - one presenter thumped another in the face, which was apparently meant to be funny). I could say it can only get better, but I carry on watching in the full knowledge that it won't!

Oh my! Moldovans wearing pointy hats, playing trumpets, complete with a pointy hatted fairy on a unicycle. You couldn't make it up.