So the annual junket that is the Eurovision Song Contest is over for yet another year and already most people will struggle to remember the name of the winning act. They will, however, remember their costumes.
As a matter of interest they were called Lordi. Because it only happened last week most people will remember that they came from Finland but even more people probably won’t care at all.
The competition was fifty years old this year and having reached that milestone it is definitely time for the European broadcasters who fund this farce to take stock of the whole thing.
Eurovision is now simply an excuse for countries to form musical alliances based solely on biased national and international relationships. It was hardly an accident that all the Balkan and Baltic states gave top marks to their neighbours and that those same nations will, as a result, compete in next years finals because they came high up the finishing order. Those placed in the lower positions, like the UK, will have to qualify via a semi final sing-off.
This annual extravaganza costs many millions of Euro to stage and in my opinion is money wasted if people are simply going to vote for their nearest neighbours and not take the songs on their merit. At one time it was considered so expensive to stage Eurovision that RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster, did everything in its power to ensure that their representative sang an awful dirge of a song so that they wouldn’t have to pay to stage the competition the next year.
In saying all of that I thought that Lordi were a breath of fresh air. Simply because they were a novelty act the like of which Eurovision had never seen before. They were different and that is why they won. That said, it is still a bit disturbing to note that they probably won more because they looked like the Orcs from Lord Of The Rings than for the musical quality of their song.
Once again the UK failed miserably and the artist whose name everybody has already forgotten can now go back to living a life of obscurity. He would have gotten more recognition for cracking up in the first week in the Big Brother house. How sad a reflection of the significance of Eurovision is that?
It is time that Eurovision was given the push or the voting system changed. But that won’t happen because the votes are cast on premium line telephone systems. It is now about making money and countries like Ireland and the UK want to win it again for that sole reason. The thing is they never will because all the mini-states from the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have it sussed.
About the team
This story was produced and edited by John Monaghan. It was published by Reach for the Sky website.
