Aquarionics

Vision

Today is Eurovision.

What is Eurovision, I hear you ask. Aha, I answer, it is thusly:

The war is over. The tack has won. This is a celibrarion of the world’s greatest testiment to plastic music: Europop (Listen to that track over the remainder of this post. It’s by the Divine Comedy).

Various countries around “Europe” (Which includes Israel, for some reason) choose a song to enter in this great tournament. Some do it by saying “It’s This Song”, some – like the UK - do a popularity contest to see which is the crapest song and put it forward. On the night itself – Tonight, fact fans – the songs are performed (To several different definitions of “Live”) on stage by their creators. At half time there is a Thing, which could be anything, and has once given the world Riverdance. Be afraid of The Thing.

Anyway, when all the various people have strutted their funky stuff over the stage, they have the big vote thing where all the countries around the world give points to ten of the other countries (That is, they give ten points to the best, then nine eight seven etc. to the rest of the shortlist), the one with the most of the points at the end is the winner, and gets the chance to host the event next year.

Yay, woot, so far, so dandy.

The important point about Eutovision (Which has now been known as “A Song For Europe” for at least five years, but nobody noticed) is the songs, which are universally terrible and include things like last year’s Greek entry, which involved four greeks dressed in black cardboard boxes moving their arms at right angles and announcing that “Sagapo is the password” to a techo-style (Yet still bubbly europop) beat. It’s tacky, it’s terrible, it’s cheap (I swear that last year they were using Winamp pluggins on the back screens) and it’s incredibly fun all on it’s own.

Add in watching the subtitles – where the BBC Subtitling Dept. try in vain to transpose “Laa de la la la” for six lines without a spelling mistake – and the only Eurovision host that matters – Terry Wogan – and watching it with a group of friends, and it’s just fantastic.

Terry Wogan is a radio show host for BBC Radio 2, and for the whole of Eurovision he is the commontator. He sits in his box in London and makes sarcastic comments about the presenters, the songs, the Thing, and the entire Eurovision experience.

Eurovision is fun, tacky, pointless fluff. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.