Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 51

And the big ‘joke’ of Eurovision – the thing that made us Brits watch even when it was really, really awful? It was the idea that everyone else was rubbish, and even though our entries (Cliff) were also rubbish, they were less rubbish than the foreigners’ stuff, and so we could simultaneously put forward rotten songs and sneer at other people for doing the same.

Because we kept winning. Fairly often. (All right, we didn’t beat Abba, but we surely knew how to rip them off – Brotherhood of Man, Bucks Fizz, and so on.) And as long as we were winning, that was all right. Britain is, after all, the greatest pop-and-roll nation in the world, apart from America, who aren’t allowed to enter the Eurovision Song Contest.

So we were also allowed to find everything hilarious because we were the best and everyone else was crap. But then something happened. Two things happened, in fact. First of all, the Europeans started getting better. They entered people who could write songs. They had catchy Eurodisco tunes. And they discovered wit (remember that Finnish death-metal band? Noël Coward couldn’t have done it better.)

The other thing that happened – the really awful yet totally predictable thing – was that we went rubbish. We started entering acts that were even worse than, say, Doctor Who in the 1980s. We completely lost the plot. By 2007 you could have entered some human hair in a box and it would have been better than the official British entry.

The solution seems obvious. We must either find someone who can write some decent songs – not easy, in this country – or withdraw gracefully, citing a musical headache of national proportions. Because soon, very soon, Terry Wogan will have nothing to take the piss out of. And that’s got to be wrong.