I'll admit it ? I can hum every Eurovision winner and I love rewatching the nail-biting 1993 contest. If only the UK took things as seriously as me, we might stand a chance of winning
My name is John and I am a fan of the Eurovision song contest. Not an ironic, one-night-a-year, let's get pissed and laugh at our silly, backward European neighbours and jokily bemoan the inevitability of the UK finishing last fan. A bona fide, hardcore, 365-day Eurovision obsessive. I could tell you every winning entrant in chronological order and hum most of them. My idea of a perfect night in involves a bottle of wine and a rewatch of the nail-biting 1993 contest in which Ireland triumphed over the United Kingdom by a single, devastating "douze points".
Chances are your primary thought at this point is not "Wow, I'd really like to sleep with this guy". Not an entirely unfair reaction ? obsession with any piece of light entertainment has more than a whiff of tragedy about it. But the British Eurovision defender gets a particularly raw deal. Our generally appalling performances in world sporting events are forgivable. We still rally behind our nation with heartwarming pride and optimism. A dismal failure in the World Cup and we furiously analyse what went wrong, assign blame where it is usually due and vow to do better next time. A disaster at the Eurovision song contest and at best we shrug, at worst we snort with derision at the poor taste and politically motivated voting of our lesser neighbour nations. Surely nobody of sound mind actually takes it seriously?
And yet, since we last won the World Cup in 1966, we've won the Eurovision song contest five times. Three of those songs, by Sandie Shaw, Brotherhood of Man and Bucks Fizz, were No 1 hits. The other two, Lulu and Katrina & The Waves, were also top five records and sizeable hits worldwide. Sweden, in many ways the natural home of the Eurovision song contest, has only fielded four winners ? and of those four only two made any waves internationally (Abba in 1974 and, to a much lesser extent, Charlotte Nilsson in 1999).
The point is, when we make the effort we're actually good at the Eurovision song contest, as opposed to football, a sport at which we plough grimly on despite a near-complete lack of national talent compared with the top-tier nations.
So why do we have such a terrible attitude towards it? It seems to me that there are three common myths about Eurovision that are frequently cited by whichever smarmy talking head the media chooses to wheel out in the wake of yet another British disaster (I'm looking at you, Pete Waterman.) Here's my attempt to redress the balance ...
Myth One
The UK will never win because everybody hates us ? a popular one, this. For reasons that have never been made quite clear, many people believe that our continental neighbours cruelly ignore our Eurovision hopefuls out of a deep-seated resentment for our nation and everything we stand for. To counter this, I would advise bracing yourselves and actually listening to our failed entries of recent years. The limp, dated disco of Andy Abraham. The tiresome end-of-the-pier camp of Scooch. The truly disturbing Daz Sampson, a chubby forty-something rapper surrounded by teenage girls in school uniform. Make no mistake; these are terrible, terrible songs. They don't represent the UK music scene, nor, despite the misguided and borderline xenophobic beliefs of many media figures, do they represent that mysterious demographic of the "great Eurovision song" (aka a naff piece of crap that those culturally stunted peasants in Slovetzia will just go wild for!).
Myth Two
It's all political, innit? ? blame Terry Wogan for this. Yes, neighbourly or "bloc" voting does exist to an extent, but almost never enough to determine the overall winner. No country has that many neighbours, for a start. Where it does take place, it is almost always more the result of shared cultural heritage than blind tit-for-tat voting. A star in Greece is usually a star in Cyprus. Swedish music is popular in Norway, and so on. The winning song is almost always a strong, well-performed track that appeals to the widest possible audience. Which is, after all, the whole point.
Myth Three
The songs are all crap ? this is, of course, a matter of personal taste. Eurovision entries have just three minutes to grab your attention and lodge themselves in your brain, so if you're a fan of free jazz, there's probably nothing to see here. But many countries genuinely use the show as a platform for their brightest talents, and the reason I love Eurovision is that every year, I discover a handful of genuinely thrilling pop songs. It's not all gold admittedly, but it's the rare year that the UK entry deserves much better than it gets.
Eurovision competitors aren't just fighting for one night of glory either. Last year's winning German entry, Satellite by Lena Meyer-Landrut, topped the charts in six countries and went top 10 in a further seven. Her album also charted well across the continent. Fairytale by Alexander Rybak, the 2009 winner from Norway, did better still, even hitting the UK top 10.
The rise of iTunes has reinvigorated the contest, allowing successful entries to instantly capitalise on the massive exposure that Eurovision still promises. Careers can be made in these three minutes on stage. At a time when the music industry is scrambling to find ways to promote their artists, it's a goldmine that has yet to be properly exploited in this country. For example a pop group such as the Saturdays ? popular here in the UK but little known abroad ? could make a real breakthrough by entering one of their catchy hits in Eurovision. But they wouldn't do it because of the perceived risk to their credibility, despite the fact that the Mercury panel aren't exactly beating down their door as it is.
To their credit, the BBC have attempted to field a moderately professional act this year by enlisting Blue. Not an ideal choice, but their song is catchy, modern and well -produced ? a huge step forward from recent years. If they do manage a good result in D�sseldorf this year, I sincerely hope we give them some credit for it, perhaps encouraging bigger and better names to represent their music and their country on this enormous international stage instead of dismissing it as beneath them. We've been patronising the silly little song contest for too long. It's time we started taking it seriously.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/musicblog/2011/may/10/three-cheers-for-eurovision
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