Here’s a link to an article about why the UK always loses the Eurovision Song Contest.
Yes, the digital, culture, media and sport committee chair Caroline Dinenage wants MPs to look into why we don’t do better in this competition, especially as we are so good at music of all kinds. Surely there are better and more important things to investigate!
When I was a child, once we acquired a TV set, which wasn’t until I was 11 or 12, we watched the build up to Eurovision every year, all the excitement of choosing the right song and the right candidate. And we got quite excited about the contest itself. Some of the songs were very good. Those were innocent times. There were only two TV channels and even the music programmes were quite refined, with well-dressed David Jacobs in charge of Disc Box Jury.. Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go were perhaps the most exciting music programmes we saw.
Have we actually won or even done well since Sandie Shaw came top with ‘Puppet on a String’ in 1967 and Cliff Richard came second with Congratulations in 1968?
I think that what I really liked about Eurovision in my teenage years was the opportunity to hear songs in foreign languages and see how much I could understand. Yes, I was that kind of geeky kid, already obsessed with the languages I was learning at school and quite likely to stay on a bus beyond my stop so that I could eavesdrop if someone was speaking in French or Spanish.
Maybe it’s a generational thing because I seem not to be the only one. I attend an Italian conversation class online. Our teacher refers to us as I Vecchi Amici because all of us are in our seventies. Anyway, one day we were talking about the Festival di San Remo, very important to the Italians, and Gigliola Cinquetti was mentioned. Her song “Non ho l’età’ was the Eurovision winner in 1964. We had an Italian class group memory and every one of us remembered the words to the song!
In 1968 another young female singer, Massiel, won with ‘La La La’, telling us that ‘Todo en la vida es como una canción’ and pipping Cliff to the post. Originally the Spanish had wanted Joan Manuel Serrat, a singer I later came to really like, to sing the song but he insisted that he wanted to sing it in Catalán. Uh, oh! Regional patriotism was not yet quite approved of and so he was dismissed and they opted for Massiel instead. Maybe it needed the appeal of a young female singer to win the points.
That year I spent the summer term of the academic year in Murcia, Spain. A Spanish friend used to delight in singing a song about how we should give them back Gibraltar, adapting the words of Cliff’s “Congratulations”.
Nowadays I take no notice of Eurovision. Granddaughters Number One and Number Two keep me apprised of the “good songs”, which mostly don’t appeal to me. Most nations sing in English and it often seems that they just want to be outrageous. Maybe I am soing the contest a disservice.
Some people are now boycotting it because of Israel’s inclusion. Quite when Israel became part of Europe is a mystery in any case!
Isn’t it amazing, how one article about something silly like the governement getting involved in making us fit to win Eurovision could provoke such a lot of nostalgia!?
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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