Out of Tune with Europe

Oh dear, whatever happened to my fellow Britons’ sense of humour? The famous stiff upper lip? Or, the maxim: it’s not winning that counts but playing the game?

All gone it appears, if the reaction to the UK’s debacle at Eurosong is anything to go by. Coming last seems to have sent my dear old homeland into a collective hissy fit of fury, with one MP tabling motion in parliament, calling on Britain not only to pull lout of further competitions but to cut off British funding for the show as well! There’s a graceful loser for you. Vote for us – or we close down your show.

Sir Terry Wogan, venerable compere of the show to UK audiences for God knows how many years, is making the same noises. A host of other TV stars have been sounding off in similar fashion: Britain must leave the Eastern Europeans to their own corrupt devices and set up a new, purified Eurosong, limited to Western Europe, where fairness and justice will rule and politics will have no place.

Putting aside the fact that - unlike Russia – Britain never puts forward a serious band for Eurosong, but always relies on absolute unknowns and complete beginners, let’s look at those objections a little closer.

The first grumble – that the former Yugoslavs and former Soviet republics all vote for each other – strikes me as a bit rich. It wasn’t that long ago that the British media were complaining that the former Yugoslavs couldn’t get along. Why oh why, I would read, do they hate each other so? Now that the former “warring tribes” (as our ex-premier John Major called them) not only “get along” but also vote for each other’s pop groups, my fellow Brits are all in a strop. Well, make your mind up is all I can say.

Moan number two, related though not identical to moan number one, is that something called “politics” has suddenly intruded itself into Eurosong – again, all thanks to the bad Balkan and ex-Soviet newcomers. Once up a time, the fairy tale goes, there was a wonderful competition where everyone judged each other’s songs on their artistic merit.

Really? They must have been watching another show from the one I saw. I am old enough to recall the days when Dublin juries almost never voted for the British entries because – funnily enough – the two countries were at loggerheads over Northern Ireland. Ever since our two countries more or less sorted out that dispute, the Irish juries have – funnily enough – warmed to the UK entries.

Isn’t that peculiar? Well, of course it isn’t. Politics was always part and parcel of Eurosong and even in the supposedly good old days of the Eurovision Song Contest, as it then was, you could always see the ancient alliances and feuds of Europe being played out nicely, year after year, in the voting scores.

No, what really annoys us Brits is the fact that whereas everyone else has become part of a Eurosong “bloc” – ex-USSR, ex-Yugoslavia, Low Countries, Scandinavia, and so forth – we are on our own, or rather, part of an Anglo-Irish bloc that’s too small to count. Of course, if we really want a bloc of our own, we could always do what the Yugoslavs did. Start with one country, explode into six pieces – no, seven! - have a few wars, and then start voting for each other in Eurosong. There’s a plan!