Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 50

The thing is with the Eurovision contest … it’s where do we begin to tell the story of how crap a thing can be? For a start, what is ‘Eurovision’? Has anybody ever seen one? Is it a company? A technique? A pseudonym for one of the Transformers? Nobody seems to know, but it’s been around since the 1950s, so it’s probably a war crime. Only joking.

Secondly, whose idea was the Song Contest? Because if there’s one thing we can be absolutely sure about regarding the countries of Europe, it’s that you don’t want to be stirring up national rivalries with that lot. These are countries who’ve gone to war over the most trivial matters – the shooting of an Archduke; the question of who’s got the real Pope – so having a contest based on something really important like music is bordering on madness.

In fact, the main criterion for joining would appear to be that your nation has recently been involved in a bloody conflict. So when the Contest started, it was all the people who’d been in the last big war. Then in the 1960s and 70s new sites of violence like Israel and Cyprus got involved. And after that? Serbia, Bosnia, places like that. One can only surmise that Estonia got in by lying to the selection panel and claiming to have had a war that nobody saw happen.