I’m sitting here, idly watching Graham Norton on BBC America, and for his closer he has on a group of singing flight attendants. Apparently they won the UK Eurovision contest.
My question…what exactly is the Eurovision contest, and why in the bejeezus would the UK pick this appalling group to represent them? Or is camp performance the whole point of the thing?
Wikipedia will give you the basic facts about the competition.
Although some “classic” pop groups participated in previous years (Abba and the like) as far back as I can remember it’s been seen as a camp joke - no credible artist would want to be associated with it (and indeed would probably fail, as with one or two exceptions it’s bubblegum pop or saccharine ballads that seems to do best).
As for the UK entry you saw, they were a second-rate pop outfit who’d released a couple of mediocre tunes in 1999 and 2000. They may be better off getting jobs as flight attendants.
Camp, Eurovision? The very idea.
It’s annual song contest between member countries of the European Broadcasting Union, which includes some nearby non-European countries such as Israel too. It is renowned for appallingly tacky music and dubious voting (each county conducts a phone poll to award points to its favourite songs - funnily enough, very often songs performed by its neighbouring countries). We in the UK are particularly proud of how we treat the whole thing as a joke, not like those humourless Europeans. This conveniently covers for the fact that with the addition of so many Eastern European countries to the EBU, these days we have about as much chance of winning as Mexico.
European football is a quality contest with skilled professionals. It attracts massive sponsorship.
Eurovision singing is a publicity stunt, which no quality musician will now enter.
Many countries both vote their traditional rivals bottom and their friends top, with no regard for quality of the music.
The winning country has to pay for next year’s contest, which costs a fortune. As an English taxpayer, thankfully England has no chance!
Lets just put it this way: the two artists who launched major international careers based on their Eurovision wins were ABBA and Celine Dion.
It’s like AI, only less authentic.
For most Americans, I suspect the only Eurovision winners that they might have heard of are ABBA, Celine Dion, Katrina and the Waves (yes, a one-hit wonder, but a major one-hit wonder, and the really weird thing is that they won the contest twelve years after their one hit), and Lulu (who was slightly more than a one-hit wonder, although that was a long time ago).
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Wow, how appallingly terrible! And yet I can’t look away…
They make my teeth hurt.
The Eurovision Contest is directly responsible for Michael Flatley, Riverdance, and everything that has followed. You be the judge.
The Eurovision Song Contest is one of those elements of European life that you either get or you don’t. This year the boys and I stayed up to watch the whole thing, with a big bowl of popcorn and the whole kit. The seven-year-old, who is not yet old enough to understand the silliness of the whole thing, was very serious about picking out his favorites and following the voting. His thirteen-year-old brother and I had to find a careful balance between hurting the little guy’s feelings and giving the whole thing the snarking it deserves. And fella bilong missus flodnak kept saying we were nuts for watching such tripe and he was going to go to bed early, but I note that he stayed up until past midnight, too. And he doesn’t even like popcorn 
I never realized it until now, but I knew what the Eurovision Song Contest was in passing: a competition involving songs and singers from all Europe. Now I know what it really is: the precursor to Pop/American Idol.
Bucks Fizz should have entered the far superior "My Camera Never Lies", but oh well. Best ever entry was Severine’s “Un Banc, Une Arbre, Une Rue”- a beautiful song.
Because we’re a country full of assholes. Yes, the Eurovision Song Contest is the campest thing on earth, but the people who chose this particular outing (public phone vote I think?) misjudged that ridiculous, artless, and smutty innuendo would clinch it. In actual fact, it did worse than anything the UK has ever produced before. The trick with the campness is to make it at least seem sincere.
The only thing worse than the UK entry last time was the Irish one, which only lacked leprechauns hitting each other with shillelaghs and saying “begorrah” to make it so Oirish that it would turn the space-time-continuum permanently green.
Sometimes there actually are good songs at the Eurovision - France often produces some great pieces - but rarely do they win. The thing is riddled with political voting and the music is generally worthless. Which is why Lordi was such a breath of fresh air (yes, dear OP, those Finnish monster-suited ‘hard rockers’ genuinely won!). Shit, but fucking hilarious.
No denying it: the Eurovision is utterly crap, which is why I watch it practically every year.
Hey! 
I like Riverdance! 
(Obviously I detest the mass of smugness that is Michael Flatley… 
)
For my money, most hard-done-by Eurovision entry ever was Hungary’s in 1994, which mystifyingly only came fourth. Two beardy Irish blokes won.
The thing I’ve never quite understood about Eurovision, in my distant, never having even seen it sort of way, is that it’s theoretically a song-writing contest, not a singing contest. Except that the songs are in multiple languages, meaning the vast majority of voters can’t understand what they’re supposed to be voting on.
That’s a good point. Anyone?
For a long while they allowed entrants to sing in any language, because it was felt that English-speaking countries had an unfair advantage, international language of pop music and all that. Then they changed back to only singing in national languages, which would often see the winners come out for the traditional victory reprise, only to immediately switch to the English version of their song, with an eye on record sales. These days they are once again allowed to sing in English.
But does it really matter? Because even if the songs were any good, the whole idea of choosing the “best” one from one listening, while having just listened to twenty other songs for the first time, is ridiculous. Frankly, after about the fifth song of the night most of them sound the same.
I’m kind of delighted and kind of horrified by Eurovision. One of my favourite things is the cheesyness of the English lyrics, which do often sound as though they were written by songwriters with only a tenuous grasp of the language.
Sic, this is the German contestant from a few years ago, who wrote the catchy lines:
Let’s get happy and let’s be friends
For tomorrow never never ends.
I like to think she’s referring to quantum mechanics. 