The pornographic awfulness of Eurovision
by Tom Goodfellow, TCW:
IT is interesting that the media coverage of the Eurovision Song Contest has focused almost exclusively on the courageous performance of the Israeli performer Eden Golan, who came fifth despite the outrageous anti-Semitic bullying of the pro-Palestinian protesters. I must confess that I watched some of the programme, my excuse being that my wife having gone early to bed, I wanted to stay up to try to see the Northern Lights (which I didn’t manage). I turned on the TV about halfway through the show, and the sheer awfulness of it sucked me in like some monstrous alien creature determined to consume me and spit me out a shrivelled shell at the end (OK, I have been watching Amazon’s The Day of the Triffids).
It was the worst television that I have ever seen, a view supported by many other commentators. The politicking around it paled into insignificance compared with the sheer banality of the songs. I grew up in the age when the show was about songwriting and the song, think Cliff, Lulu and Abba. Then, all the singing, backing and musical support was live, and we used to watch it with the kids and laugh at the partisan nature of the voting along with Terry Wogan’s gentle humour. True, it was rather camp, but having been brought up on programmes such as Round the Horne (‘I’m Julian, this is my friend Sandy’), British camp was generally very funny.
The current batch of ‘songs’, (and I use the word loosely) were largely identical, each with a short introductory section, followed by an explosion of sound, laser lights, flares and frantic gyrating by a supporting team of near-naked dancers. Most of the performances were overtly sexual in nature. Many were dark, with sado-masochistic and indeed Satanic overtones. The backing voices and instrumentals were all pre-recorded, and the staging, although spectacular, simply drowned out any lyrics or meaningful content. I challenge anyone to remember a single one of them.
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