The ballad of goat mountain

The Eurovision Song Contest is, in many ways, the Jerusalem artichoke of song contests.

Famously, the Jerusalem artichoke is not from Jerusalem. Also, it’s not an artichoke. It’s basically a dumpy potato from North Dakota that’ll give you a stomachache. And yet, through design and accident, it’s joined the club of things that have exotic and somewhat undeserved names: President for Life; the Chilean sea bass (not a bass, not from Chile).  

Eurovision feels like it has a very similar vibe going on, and that includes the stomachache. I mean, Australia and Israel are in it. So … not exactly “European”. It’s a perplexing blend of popular vote and points awarded by judges, which makes the “contest” part of it an arcane mess more convoluted than Belgian tax law. And, ahem … (come on, you knew this was coming) … there isn’t much evidence of there being any actual songs in it.

Badum tish.   

Until now I have not really given this hysterical tentpole of the European TV calendar remotely any thought, except to watch the Will Ferrell Netflix movie (which is very good) – and to know that it’s an easy punchline to trot out when you want to remind yourself that Europeans can be real idiots sometimes. But I’m not so under a rock that I’m not aware of the enormous cottage industry that exists around it. Podcasts, articles, watch parties, frenzied speculation surrounding each individual country’s process to choose who they even send to this thing – Eurovision truly is far greater than just one night of novelty-raps about ham. But even so, I lived a relatively Eurovision-free life.

Saunas, inflatable weasels and tinfoil

And then, I was invited to a watch party. I wanted to say no, to shrug off this nonsense I considered beneath me. But there were promises of sausages. And pretzel rolls. And there’s nothing quite like a pretzel roll to make me compromise all my deeply held convictions really, really fast. And so, fine. Sitting through some kitsch techno-rave sung by someone clinging to an inflatable weasel felt like a small price to pay for free pretzel rolls.

Almost immediately, it felt like all my snarky instincts about this thing were going to have a field day. There was a song called Icht Komme (oddly sung by the Finnish entrant). The Swedes had a novelty “song” about saunas (if you start encountering people over the next couple of months who unironically overpronounce the word sauna at you, it will be because of this), and the Icelandic entry, the country of Björk and Sigur Rós, was two guys in tinfoil flailing about in a boat that looked very much like it was sinking. Though, somehow, I think this was all intended.

Also, if you were to design a drinking game where every time someone dramatically tore away their outfit to reveal another impossibly dramatic outfit underneath the first one, you’d be shotgun-wedding-in-Vegas drunk by the first ad-break.

Some of the comments from our own peanut-gallery were similarly, encouragingly, sneering. “This song is very bad. And he’s also not singing it very well.” “That set design makes it looks like she has violent diarrhoea, did no-one see that in rehearsals?” “San Marino isn’t even a real country.” And it’s not like the creators of this event were making it hard.

Because this year’s competition was hosted in Switzerland (the host country is always that of the previous year’s winner), each finalist had a sort of James Bond-meets-National Lampoon’s Vacation intro-segment where they performatively mugged their way through some kind of archetypical “Swiss Experience”. But the problem is, with 26 acts, you start to run out of things to give these poor sods to do. At some point someone was flown up a mountain literally just to sit next to a goat. The Swiss tourism board must have been ecstatic.

However, the thing that makes it maybe my (spoiler alert) new favourite thing that exists on planet earth, is how little the Eurovision Song Contest seems to care about any of this. It has the most genuinely self-aware “no fucks given” energy of anything I’ve ever seen. It’s actually breathtaking. At one point one of the presenters, the Swiss comedian Hazel Brugger, tossed off the line: “We Swiss don’t need to express our emotions – we have money.” I almost stood up and applauded for the sheer, nonchalant “We understood the assignment” of it all.

Because something weird was starting to happen while I was finishing my second wurst and putting less and less of my back into being snarky at someone called Tommy Cash singing a song about macchiatos.

I was getting … really … into it.

It was, as it so often is with me, the Italians’ fault. They had an endearingly morose entry, sung by a guy who looked like he went to clown-school against his parents’ wishes while sitting at a preposterously large piano. Every aspect of it seemed designed to be deliberately heinous, except it was actually … good? The guy was singing for Italy dressed like a failed mime. And he was absolutely going for it.

Came for the sausages, stayed for the set design

The thing that makes this oddball and mostly incomprehensible event absolutely unique is that it’s 100% cynicism-proof. It is immune to the hate-watch. I know this, because I tried my absolute best. By the time the Swedes were mucking about with a set that looked like it was heisted from a Wes Anderson movie, and despite every fibre of my being trying to resist, I was being undeniably swept away by this relentlessly cheerful tide of bombastic gimmickry and self-aware high camp.

And that’s maybe the key (and the lesson): as impossibly over the top as this event actually is, it’s also maybe the most sincere thing I’ve ever watched. It’s such a strange dynamic to square away – the ludicrous spectacle-for-the-sake-of-spectacle schtick of it all, but when everyone is giving it everything they’ve got with the self-belief and intentionality of the Olympics, it’s impossible not to fall for it.  

So, I came for the sausages, ended up staying for the pencil moustaches and insane set design, and left emotionally compromised by France. The winner (from Austria) flailed about in a boat while singing something that sounded stolen from The Fifth Element, and there were enough meaningless key-changes to make you want to get it declared an offence punishable in a court of law. As well as a wind-machine budget that would make the government of Papua New Guinea shed a silent tear. And somehow, none of it felt ironic.

Eurovision is what happens when sincerity stops caring if you laugh at it – and somehow, that makes it kind of profound.

_{Top image: Finland’s Erika Vikman performs at the Eurovision Song Contest in Basel, Switzerland. Picture: Harold Cunningham/Getty Images.}