Well, what a weekend and a half that was. At nix towers we celebrated Eurovision the only way we know how, by rounding up whatever friends we could, filling them with food and drink, and bellowing abuse at all the slow songs. Those of us that were there for Engelbert’s performance donned our BBC Engelburns thusly:
If I’m honest, the competition descended into chaos fairly swiftly after that.
As the semi-finals had rejected most of the acts which were funny, interesting or good, it was a fairly iffy contest. Riddled with ballads, and laden down by everyone having to remember not to mention the human rights offences, spouse remained (mainly) stone cold sober throughout as he sorted the catering, and I discovered a refreshing health tonic called champagne which got me through the voting.
At least last year Bulgaria gave us one douze points which gave us some degree of dignity. Not so this year. This year, we got twelve poxy points in total, and I spent much of the evening bellowing at the screen, “Don’t vote for Norway!” so that at least poor Engels would be spared the indignity of coming last. In the event, he came penultimate, failing to beat even the Jedwards, but triumphing over Norway. I had a mild moment of victory because for the first time ever I’d correctly identified the winning act: Sweden’s euphoria romped home as we all knew it would. But it was scant consolation for poor Engel’s decent into the lower echelons of the scoreboard.
The British reacted with typical style and grace to our defeat. The BBC message boards were riven with the traditional catcalls for us to stop wasting the licence fee on a contest we could never win, it was all political anyway, we should field separate acts for England, Scotland, Wales and northern Ireland because at least that way we could vote for each other. My favourite remark was from the gentleman who argued that while the Euro doesn’t work, plainly the English language does, so couldn’t we charge the Europeans for using it as their international language, thus generating valuable funds for us to pay off the deficit.
In fact, the only sensible remark I could see was from someone who did a great deal of business with europe and had chatted with some of his partners about the eurovision song contest. They said our continued failure had nothing to do with the war, our arrogance, or even our location. It was that they knew perfectly well that the UK is by far one of the best musical nations in Europe, and yet despite having produced oasis, Robbie Williams, Coldplay and the Stereophonics, we continue to field X-factor rejects and people in the latter stages of their careers. When we sent songs by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Blue, we ended up in or around the top ten.
The only gratifying thing about Saturday’s competition was that those nations who were relying heavily on (ahem) maidenly or manly charms bombed almost as much as we did. Sweden won because they really wanted to. They sent a good singer, an immediately catchy song and marketed the thing so well that it had hit number one in four nations.
In a word, it was euphoric.
Next time, we return to standard service, continuing our voyage around a thousand things in London. But many thanks to AngloInfo for offering to donate £50 to the British Heart Foundation for my Eurovision coverage. I have now raised £397 of the £500 I said I’d raise for the charity. £103 to go!
