The Song Remains The Same

Eurovision again… This seems to come around faster and faster each year and, aside from giving me the chance to spend the day slightly inebriated whilst dressing up in the style of Agnetha Fältskog or someone, the show itself still manages to remain strangely entertaining despite the fact that 90% of the songs are complete and utter manufactured crap.

I actually blame the X-factor for this. There are versions of the X-Factor, The Voice or the various “Got Talent” type programmes in most of the European broadcasting nations (for example, the Azerbaijan one is called Özünü Tanit which probably translates as loads in Scrabble). These are all essentially glorified karaoke competitions and the concept of someone developing their own songs and style go out of the window as the talent show sausage machine turns out yet another clone that is high on presentation but low on musical content.

The odd thing is that I still found this all quality entertainment largely because of waiting to see what visual spectacle the stage directors could come up with to make their near identical, dull-as-ditchwater ditty stand out from all the other clones. On occasion this was ingenious (I particularly think the Russian entry was a magical piece of visual trickery) but I think the absolute stand out moment was actually from the Swedish production team that came up with this wonderful, tongue-in-cheek montage of how to write a Eurovision winner:



I suppose even my least favourite element, the voting, was vastly improved. Partly this was because it was much shorter than the past but also because they accumulated all the phone votes at the end so it wasn’t possible to see who won until the final score: which turned out to be the Ukrainian entry with one of the few serious ballads of the night, a song called 1944 (presumably because they weren't allowed to call it F*** You Putin.) Oh well, just another year to wait until we see what sparkly light-show Kiev can put on.