COMMENTARY: Anyone for Sopot? (A Eurovision rant)

The Cold War is dead, long live the Eurovision culture-wars

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By William Moore
     
      Donald would have been proud. Donald Rumsfeld, that is.
      There it was again, in numbers that tell no lie: flabby old "Old Europe" getting its backside well and truly kicked by the vibrant young things of "New Europe", as the East European nations and former Soviet Republics - places that didn't formally exist as sovereign states just two decades ago - came and swept the board at the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest.
     
Of the first ten finishers in Helsinki, only one - Greece - could count itself almost in the "Old Europe" camp (and I use that last word advisedly), and even Greece is part of the notorious Balkan and East European mafia that allegedly divvies up the votes amongst themselves to pervert-this-once-great-cultural-institution, etc, etc, ad nauseam...
     
Oh boy, was Old Europe ticked off! You bet. "Voting bias", they shrieked, and when the semi-finals threw up only Eastern European entries in the ten songs selected to go forward to the Helsinki final, they definitely had a point and a reason to feel somewhat threatened by it all.
      The writing has been on the wall for years, of course. Last year's bizarre Lordi triumph interrupted a sequence that tells its own story: Estonia 2001, Latvia 2002, Turkey 2003, Ukraine 2004, Greece 2005, and now Serbia in 2007.
      Or maybe it didn't interrupt anything - most people west of Hamburg probably think Finland is another of those dreadful Eastern European newcomers.
      There are rumblings of discontent within the traditional Eurovision superpowers of old, as the online discussion forums of the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter declared that "unconfirmed reports" suggest countries like Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland might be considering taking their glittering disco-ball and going home in a huff.
     
That old curmudgeon Sir Terry Wogan, beloved of British Eurovision cynics for his annual sarky remarks about the individual competitors and the contest on the BBC, weighed in even more heavily than usual with the "It's all fixed anyway", "Baltic blocks, Balkan blocks, and Russian blocks", and "They hate us, you know" routine.
      Is it any wonder the British always seem to send the most rank and vile acts these days - nobody with any talent would stick their neck out to be ritually executed by Wogan.
      Aside from slagging off the entries, Sir Terry predicted - with commendable accuracy - which countries would vote for which of their neighbours, as local politics and tribal and cultural ties won out over anything remotely linked to the "quality" of the composition. Which is of course a matter of taste anyway, but that's quite another bunch of sour grapes.
     
What tends to be forgotten in all this griping is that the UK (five previous trophies, but 23rd in 2007) and Ireland (seven trophies and last this year) are guilty of a reverse variant of the football fans' cardinal sin of "only singing when you are winning".
     
They were, for instance, never heard complaining very loudly about the perceived injustice of the years when everyone had to perform in their own language, when someone trying to peddle a song in Portuguese or Finnish or Serbo-Croat had a tough fight on his or her hands against the might of Bad English, the lingua franca of the European continent. It is no great surprise that Portugal has never won Eurovision, or that it took Finland 45 years, a song in English, and a lot of latex and fireworks to pull the trick off.
      In those halcyon language-restricted days from 1966-1973 and from 1977-1999, the UK and Ireland racked up most of the dozen wins they have between them, and it is a moot point whether the songs as such were so great - Boom Bang-a-Bang, anyone? - or whether instead they were simply "more accessible" by virtue of the familiar language in which they were delivered.
      Besides, as Bjørn Erichsen, the Danish Director of Television for the European Broadcasting Union, pointed out archly on Sunday, the just-joined countries of Eastern Europe remained calm and composed in the 1990s when the spoils went to Ireland (four times in five years), Norway, and the UK.
     
Svante Stockselius, the executive supervisor of the competition and therefore effectively "Mr. Eurovision", went a great deal further.
      He snapped back at Swedish criticism of the result and commented that the tabloid and discussion group reactions were little more than nasty low-level racism.
      He argued that the thrust of the critics' response to the Eastern European success was that 'as long as these new mickeymouse countries play nice and sing their silly folk-songs and don't get in the way and don't win, they can take part in OUR song contest'. Stockselius is a Swede, by the way.
     
Clearly the countries of Eastern Europe have not adhered to the Olympic spirit of taking part rather than winning, and now the Eurovision boot is seriously on the other foot. "Hubris, come and meet my friend Nemesis".
      The old champions are all down in the relegation basement, or they would be if four of them - the UK, France, Germany, and Spain - did not get an automatic bye into the finals each year, because they are the EBU's money-bags.
      A fifth automatic finalist would be Italy, but the Italians already voted with their feet in the mid-90s, after Enrico Ruggeri finished as an also-ran when they thought he should have won. Another early Eurovision stalwart, Luxembourg (five wins between 1956 and 1983), quit at the same time for much the same reasons.
      The timing of these defections is significant. Whingeing Wogan even muttered that the Cold War had been won, but Eurovision had been "lost". With a nice twist of irony, he cited the lack of democracy in the Eurovision televoting, just as Europe has seen democracy topple the dominoes of the former Soviet Union and its satellites.
     
This next claim may seem a stretch, but there is in the current grumbling about the Eurovision Song Contest an analogy for Europe's political and economic development over the past twenty years.
      The political leaders of the old countries of Western Europe have welcomed the breaking down of ideological walls, the unification of Germany and the entire continent, the "Four Freedoms" of movement of labour, capital, goods, and services, and the enlargement of the European Union and NATO, but their citizens have not been quite so upbeat.
      The wider public has instead expressed alarm at perceived and actual corruption and possible "religious issues", has fretted over the loss of industrial jobs to cheap manufacturing nations, has wondered at the rapid pace of those countries' economic development relative to their own, and has grumbled bitterly at the prospect of an influx of migrant Lithuanian plumbers, Bulgarian housepainters, and Polish bricklayers into their already depressed employment markets.
      And now there are new culture-wars being discussed just as the Cold War goes into the history books, because the Eurovision Song Contest playground has been taken over by gangs of tough new kids on the block, who have also shown remarkable networking skills.
     
So, if the irritated West Europeans do decide to pull the plug and quit the Eurovision party, where will that leave things?
      Possibly right back where they were a quarter of a century ago, before all those comings and goings and velvet revolutions that reshaped the map of Europe.
      For in those days there were TWO such annual shindigs: the European Broadcasting Union's Eurovision and the Intervision Song Contest, the Socialist bloc's rival gathering run under the direction of the International Radio and Television Organisation (OIRT). The OIRT (1946-1993) was a network of Eastern European radio and television broadcasters.
      The Intervision show was itself a spin-off from an earlier and more established competition, the Sopot International Song Festival, and it was held annually in this Polish seaside town between 1977 and 1980.
      Sopot actually began in 1961, and was open to all comers, regardless of their political persuasion.
      Finland even won the Intervision Song Contest in 1980, when Lordi were still in monster diapers, with a ditty from Marion Rung, prophetically titled Where Is The Love?
     
But Europe was divided then, split along political lines. The ISC was a typical Cold War construct.
      Now all that division nonsense is behind us and Europe is one big happy family, so they say, with the old Socialist-bloc OIRT merged into the EBU since 1993.
      Nevertheless, the signs are that familiarity is breeding a measure of contempt and - at least on the singing front - that some people would like to go back to the old days.
      They long for a simpler time, when pukka countries like Ireland, France, Luxembourg, the UK, or Holland could have panels of experts picking songs, professional juries giving the points, and they could carve the contest up amongst themselves without having to worry about Georgia or Moldova or Azerbaijan (are they even in Europe, anyway?) getting in the way, or without the democracy of new-fangled televoting, where those staunchly loyal members of the Armenian diaspora and the Turkish and Balkan emigrés and the Lithuanian plumbers all feverishly tap "ESC22" into their mobile phones.
     
The message of the day is: "Hey, we STARTED this thing, and we pay for it, so we want to win it!"
      It's all a bit reminiscent of comments about the UN, when you think about it.
      But do we really want to go back to those old times, even in song? Is it worth the hassle, especially considering that these new usurpers are mostly members of the same friendly EU club as those who are now making most noise? Equally, if the West Europeans are the ones who have been fussing so far, it will not be long before the other side recognise their clout and channel it into nationalist-fuelled defiance. And that will hardly foster European harmony, which was supposed to be the idea of the show in the first place, wasn't it?
     
There are simpler and less drastic adjustments that could be made. Tweaking the voting systems somewhat - it IS rather bizarre that Andorra's 70,000 inhabitants can give the same douze points as Germany's 80 million - would be a start.
      Still, if it all goes proportional it would have to be determined on the votes cast, rather than the respective populations. I suspect some countries are more enthusiastic in this department than others. Eurovision is not yet quite so much of a joke in the "new" Europe.
      This might even be one sound reason why they are winning, of course, although one isn't supposed to say that: we in the West want to be able to ridicule the entire competition from pillar to post AND win it.
     
Some closer scrutiny of the voting - send in an OSCE observer or two to look at the usual suspects - might smooth the ruffled feathers of the Maltese, who have claimed it was all stitched up in advance. That's why they gave 12 points to the UK entry, they say. It was all a protest. Phew, that's a relief, at least. People might have thought they liked the tune.
      Producing a song that is half-decent (or totally indecent) would also help. Perhaps Tony Blair could reform his college band Ugly Rumours and sing Never Mind the Blocks, Here's the ex-Premier... No, on second thoughts, perhaps not.
      But crying into your beer and threatening to walk out because Europe has "come together" and more and more countries are taking part in what is after all only an annual exercise in extreme kitsch seems rather drama-queenish.
     
Of course, it wouldn't matter a jot to the Finns even if we did go down this East-West route, because in those days of the late 1970s there was just one European country that belonged to both the EBU and its East European counterpart - scrupulously neutral little Suomi.
      So we'd probably embrace the schism, dust off our old Helsinki Summit role as bridge-builder, and wait another 45 years for a shot at songfest stardom. Hey, maybe it would only be 22 years if we doubled our chances.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Serbian ballad wins Eurovision Song Contest - Belgrade hosts in 2008 (14.5.2007)

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