One (Euro)vision

Record Store Day. What a washout. I had intended to write this month’s piece on it. Well, I queued for 2 hours to get into the store and found that the pieces I had intended to buy (Christopher Lee’s albums) weren’t even due to arrive until the following week – defeating the point of Record Store Day surely.

Still, there’s one big topic to talk about this month; the grand final comes too late but the palaver around it and the semi-finals are still entertainment enough, and ripe ground for mockery. It is of course the national joke that is Eurovision; the place where I got to know the later Sir Terry Wogan for his merciless barbs, a trend that Graham Norton has thankfully continued. 

And really, how can you not mock something that this year has had Australia continuing to enter, and getting into a dispute with the rules over whether facetime is an acceptable song lyric (it is as it turns out) and saw the British entry fight tooth and nail to be able to fly the Welsh flag (being from Wales) as the red dragon was seen as being a political statement and featured alongside the ISIS flag on the banned list.

So, the first semi-final; opened up with last year’s winner supported by a band of oompa-loompas throwing dance moves right out of 2005; no more really needs be said about how ridiculous it looked, and that’s not even the actual show underway – that began with Sweden welcoming Europe, for the intro of Final Countdown to start playing (and how we all wish it was the final countdown already on the songs with enough cheese in them to keep Wallace busy for the next few years).

As for the first semi-final: 
Finland were supposed to have a suede moose costume. I didn’t notice it first time, but the fact that I went back to watch again says a lot about how ridiculous they were. Greece sang about a rising sun and a utopian land, which just sounds like the Golden Dawn have abandoned running for parliament on a neo-Nazi ticket to just pen some sort of catchy tunes. Moldova were only notable for their failed Daft Punk hopeful – it’s robots not astronauts, read the memo next time.

Hungary and Holland put in professional performances with little spectacle; do they not know what this is about? At least Croatia understood, dressing their act in what appeared to be tinfoil and some feather rugs under a curtain while San Marino entered a background character from the Godfather and some leftovers from Star Trek to take the can’t be arsed award. 
Cyprus, decent song aside, seemed confused as to where they are: Eurovision isn’t a place for serious rock bands, and the amount of cages seemed more suited to an S&M dungeon than on a stage – somewhere Estonia’s entry seemed to want to take you judging by their appearance; there’s a line where come hither eyes become the stare of a creep with a windowless van and burlap sack outside. They crossed it and then some.
And the yearly surprise early elimination – that goes to Iceland. Possibly because of the Lovecraftian nightmare of ghostly hands, shadow monsters, Slenderman and Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds shadow play going on behind her; I wouldn’t vote to see that again. 
The second semi-final topped the first for the ridiculousness of the intro; a forced, hackneyed series of references that just made me think of an old radio show: And Be Done With It (Just the intro tune before the ed. changes anything).

There were more interesting costumes to come – Switzerlands flaming arm-pits and blind for a skirt (still the best thing about their act) and Polands Sargent Pepper knock-off with the supply teacher goatee – for such a brightly coloured jacket it shocks me that the colour of his life was a very grey beige judging by the tedium of the song. 

Worse still was the Israeli act – glittery fingerless gloves and a haircut that made it look like A Flock of Seagulls had been chucked through the American shop Hot Topic, with a complete misunderstanding of the vetruvian man works. It made the Belarussian CGI wolf guitarist, and the brief duet between Benjen Stark and Dr Manhattan look normal, and that’s not something I ever expected to say (although given he was supposed to be naked with real wolves, I think we still dodged a bullet).
It’s easy to poke fun at the rubbish acts, but Ireland definitely deserve it – like they tried to convince westlife to come back but couldn’t, so just threw together some lookalikes from down the pub, as opposed to the Macedonia act, who had clearly just come from the pub, screaming as she was for a doner, doner, doner (kebab).

While I could ask why Australia are taking part (it’s genuinely baffling), what is even more baffling is why she was wearing a strip of diamond encrusted wallpaper as a sash across her shoulder; proper Kanye West level of dress sense going on there. It wasn’t even the worst costume though – that goes to Bulgaria, who dressed herself in strips of reflective vest, creating shoulder armour, leg braces and a single ear-ring out of it – presumably to make the haircut the least stupid thing about her.

The final thing to note was the over use of lighting, particularly by the soviet bloc – Ukraine payed 20 grand for their lighting, while Georgia decided that raves were just too non-eventful, blinding everyone. Possibly to disguise the fact that their entry was Josh Widdicombe in a hat stolen from Pharrell Williams.