TONIGHT IS the 50th Eurovision Song Contest, the moment when Europe, for a few precious hours, will speak the same language. And what a strange language it is.
Who can forget Diggi-loo, Diggi-ley, the Swedish song that won in 1984, or Ringe-Dinge-Ding, the Dutch entry in 1967, that was followed in 1975 by the even more powerfully evocative Ding A Dong? Lulu made the greatest British contribution to the Eurovision lexicon with Boom Bang-a-Bang in 1969, but every country has contributed something: Norway, with Oj, Oj, Oj (1969), Spain with the winning La La La (1968), Monaco with Boum-Badaboum (1967), and Diri-Diri, by Kostas Bigalis & The Sea Lovers, the Greek offering in 1994.
What did it all mean? No one can be quite sure, but for one evening every year for half a century, Europe has come together in a festival of joyful inanity, kitsch crooning, national pride, sequins and nipple tape. More than 100 million people are expected to tune in to the contest this year, from Kiev to Kilkenny, for the Eurovision Song Contest is a cultural monument to what most Europeans think it means to be European. Thus, like the European Union itself, the contest is driven by good intentions, but riven by festering national animosities, unacknowledged alliances, linguistic conflict, and a dubious voting system that no one really understands.
Over the years, the contest has served as an unlikely metaphor for Europe: parallel politics in a lamé jumpsuit. Eurovision was invented in 1956 by a French music producer called Marcel Bezençon as “a way of uniting the countries of postwar Europe”; the EEC arrived a year later, with only six members. Today the EU has 25 members, and more than 40 countries will compete for tonight’s prize and the right to stage next year’s extravaganza.
What began as an exclusive Western European club has expanded and, in recent years, moved markedly eastwards. As in Europe, the most enthusiastic participants are also the newest. Ukraine are the hosts tonight; Turkey, Latvia and Estonia have won the three previous years. In each case, the winning country hailed its victory as a political breakthrough. “We are no longer knocking at Europe’s door,” declared the Estonian Prime Minister after his country’s victory in 2001. “We are walking through it singing.” (Even by Eurovision standards of hyperbole, this was a stretch: nobody who heard Estonia’s Tanel Padar and Dave Benton perform Everybody could seriously describe it as “singing”.)
The Turks saw their win in 2003 as a harbinger of entry into the EU, and after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, tonight’s competition is a powerful symbol of Viktor Yushchenko’s pro-European inclinations. This is all faintly absurd when you reflect that the real reason the competition is being held in Ukraine is because the Ukrainian singer Ruslana leapt on stage in a leather jockstrap last year and sang: “Inside you my head spins round and round.” Painful for all parties, I should imagine, but enough to win her an incomprehensible 280 points.
Conversely, the countries of Old Europe regard the contest through increasingly jaundiced eyes. The Italians no longer bother to compete. The British regard the whole thing as a camp joke, a stitch-up worthy of smothering under a thick blanket of Terry Wogan mockery; but we still get angry when we lose. Even the Irish, who have won the contest more often than any other nation, claim to be taking it less seriously (and have already been eliminated). France invented the game and won the first three contests, but a new survey of Eurovision voting patterns by a team of Oxford statisticians found France to be notably “out of tune” with the rest of Europe. The French have not won since 1977, and the country seems increasingly disillusioned by a contest it can no longer dominate. A week from now, millions of Frenchmen and women will vote against the EU constitution, for rather similar reasons.
Behind the flagwaving, the glitter and the Bulgarian nose flutes lie raw politics. Cyprus and Greece tend to give maximum points to one another, but few to Turkey; the Nordic and Baltic countries vote, in comradely fashion, for each other; the little countries take the opportunity to stick it to the big ones. The big countries insist it is all tacky nonsense, unless they win, at which point it becomes enormously significant. When the dire British duo Jemini polled nul points in 2003, anti-war politicians claimed that this reflected European opposition to Tony Blair’s stance on Iraq (while ignoring the fact that Cry Baby was itself a crime against humanity). Even the spread of English through the competition, despite protests from language purists who believe contestants should sing in their mother tongue, reflects wider tensions within the EU.
Beside all this, the music is merely background, ranging from quietly mediocre to triumphantly bad. Winners seldom go on to enjoy big chart success. Indeed, the competition has only produced one pop classic, and then Abba changed the name of their 1974 entry from Honey Pie to Waterloo at the last moment and went on to win. (The British jury — with the cussedness that has so long characterised our relations with Europe — awarded Waterloo zero points.)
Of course, one should not read too much meaning into Eurovision. For two years now I have been pondering what the Austrian cabaret artist Alf Poier can possibly have meant when he sang:
Little Rabbits have short noses
And kittens have soft paws
And Mother Holle likes her wool
From the African Dromedary.
The answer remains mysterious, like much of Eurovision. How has a competition of such limited musical merit not only survived, but expanded over half a century? How can the same event be regarded with deadly earnestness by one part of Europe and derision by the other, but remain equally popular with both? How did Nana Mouskouri get away with appearing as the Luxembourg contestant in 1963? And what is a Diggi-loo?
In the end, Eurovision is less a contest than an idea, a vision of Europe, a long-running exercise in hopeful internationalism that is simultaneously naff, hilarious and oddly touching. Away from the pomposity and boredom of Brussels and Strasbourg, this is the one moment of the year we can say “Hello Belgium”, and mean it.
Eurovision can make even the most hardened cynic feel better, or at least superior. Offering predictions about this contest is foolish, but here is one: if France wins the Eurovision Song Contest today, then the French will vote “yes” in the EU referendum.
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