In Which We Watch Eurovision

In the end it was Sweden, of course. They were the favorites to win this year and their song scored a narrow victory over a goofy but honestly more entertaining song from Finland, and so another Eurovision gets put to bed.

We like Eurovision in our house. It’s one of the premier kitsch events in the world, a vast and unwieldy version of the Olympics only with power ballads, onstage pyrotechnics, high camp, low comedy, and enough gender fluidity to give every politician in Florida an aneurysm, which of course only recommends it that much more. It is also one of the most pointlessly enjoyable things you will ever see and there are not nearly enough such things in the world as far as I am concerned.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, you really should watch it. We try to make an event of it in our house these days. Lauren actually is home from school this weekend, so all four of us hung out today and watched the final together. It was a good way to spend time together, commenting on the acts and the play by play – the American broadcasters left the semi-finals to the actual UK hosts, but for the finals they had Johnny Weir in a little inset screen making his own commentary. I suppose if they have to have anyone do that it might as well be Weir, whose entire personality exists as a Eurovision stereotype and who does as good a job as anyone could be expected to do in that role even if he does need to learn not to try to talk over people. It’s just that his entire job is superfluous. The actual hosts are fine.

For those of you unfamiliar with how Eurovision works, it’s basically a song contest. It’s been running since 1956, and every country in Europe (or who is part of some nebulous European television consortium, which is how you also get Israel, Australia, and the various small nations in the Caucasus Mountains) gets to submit one song. The song has to be no longer than three minutes or so, and the rules say that during the contest itself the lead vocals have to be live, the instrumentals have to be pre-recorded, and the backing vocals can be either. Each participating nation gets to decide how to choose their own song – some hold contests, some just have an appointed body choose. And then you have a party.

Last year’s winning country usually hosts this year’s performance, but since – in one of the most predictable results in the history of the contest – Ukraine won last year and nobody really wanted to try to host the most popular musical event in the world while under steady Russian bombardment, the United Kingdom, last year’s runner up, agreed to host for them.

There are two nights of semi-finals, during which your personal favorites will be unceremoniously eliminated, and then there is the grand finale. At least that’s how it seems to work when I watch.

Each semi-final sends ten acts to the final, with last year’s winner plus the representatives of the five countries that pay for most of this (France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the UK) getting a pass to the final so you don’t get to see them until the very end. I kept a running count during each semi-final, ranking the acts as they came across.

There were a few general trends that I noticed while doing so.

After the bright colors of the 80s last year, this year the 60s and 70s (and their 90s revivals) were in, with a whole pile of updated disco songs and performers wearing clothing that went out of style somewhere between Altamont and New Wave. Many singers were barefoot, and in a fascinating change from the usual order of things most of the women’s outfits were fairly restrained while the men dominated the risqué clothing selections. Also, for some reason, a lot of singers chose to perform while lying on their backs. I am not sure why. I do know that this makes it harder to sing.

In the first semi-final four of my five top songs were eliminated while three of my bottom four made it in, which only goes to show you how out of touch I am, I suppose. My personal favorite was Azerbaijan, whose act was basically what you would get if Pippen Took and Merry Brandybuck put together a tribute band to The Animals, and I thought they deserved better. My second semi-final was more on target as all of my top seven made it in, though Georgia was clearly robbed. On the flip side, both Serbia and Switzerland made it to the finals despite neither of them really being able to carry a tune, and while Croatia’s performance was phenomenally entertaining in an “aggravated what-the-fuckery” kind of way I can’t really see how they went through either. There were serious overtones of Monty Python in their act, which admittedly was more fun than Moldova recreating the Stonehenge scene from This Is Spinal Tap.

Other notable performances included Finland, whose “hyperpop” song was performed by a guy with the same haircut as Moe from the Three Stooges wearing a neon green shirt that consisted solely of puffy sleeves and a collar; France, performing a disco torch song that I really enjoyed; Poland, who should be expecting a plagiarism lawsuit from Shakira any day now; and one act whose country of origin now escapes me but whose song would have been Top-40 on American AM radio in 1979 had it aired then. Boogie oogie oogie, and all that jazz. I thought Graham Norton’s comment that Belgium’s song was every song you ever listened to at a bar mitzvah in the 90s was a bit harsh, though I can’t say he was wrong even if I did like the song. Also, if anyone can explain what Germany was doing up there, let me know.

We got to vote this year, which is new. The usual process for choosing a winner in Eurovision, as near as I can tell, is that each of the countries who participated last year gets to have a professional jury award up to twelve points to their top ten countries – they make a big deal of showing you who gets the 12-point haul – and then the public gets to make all that irrelevant with their votes. You’re not allowed to vote for your own country, but otherwise anything goes. Normally they limit the public vote to participating countries, but this year they gave “the rest of the world” the equivalent of one country’s vote. I strongly suspect it didn’t make a bit of difference, but it was fun to have a vote anyway.

You can vote up to twenty times, at a cost of about a euro a vote, and since there were four of us watching that worked out to five votes apiece. My top five were Norway – my choice for the clear winner – France, Italy, Finland, and Lithuania, in that order. Sweden, by comparison, came in 8th on my list – a fun song, but not my top choice.

For the record, Italy and Finland came in third and fourth according to the juries, while Lithuania came in eleventh and France sixteenth. When you add in the popular vote, Finland came in second – the only country even remotely close to Sweden in the overall points standings – while Italy placed fourth, and Lithuania and France stayed in eleventh and sixteenth respectively. So, not too bad.

Next year Eurovision will be in Sweden. Perhaps we’ll try to go.