But sadly Ireland (7pts) and Malta (the full twelve) rescued Scooch from total ignominy. Of course, we didn’t give Ireland any points in return so I bet they’re regretting that now.
We had the worst song. Even that Ukrainian drag act, the French’s inexplicable Parisian routine and the Latvian’s Il Divo clone were better than ours. Only the Irish stereotype number dragged itself to our level. Sure, Cyndi wouldn’t have won either, but we’d probably have ended up closer to mid table. (Much as it pains me to say it, the Big Brovaz number would probably have done best out of our lot – generoballads didn’t do well this year.)
This was my Twitter reaction when watching:
- 21:21:26: Much as it it pains me to say this, this is our entry: Scooch, with “Flying The Flag (For You)”.
- 21:22:34: At least they’re in tune. They’ve never managed it before.
- 21:23:15: They’ve kept the godawful salted-nuts type puns in, which are *dreadful*.
- 21:24:12: Oh God. “Pleasurable journey” with crotch movements. Why couldn’t this not have been our entry?
- 21:24:45: And here it comes, the worst pun of all – “suck on for landing”. NUL… POINTS! NUL… POINTS!
It was a poor joke to begin with, and the godawful tuneless “would you like something to suck on?” bits sealed it; people just ended up confused about what they were watching. What was worse was that it didn’t have a tune – to pick up those Europeans who don’t understand English innuendo (like Lithuania’s “We Are The Winners Of Eurovision” song did last year – it ended up coming sixth). They grated in Making Your Mind Up, and I thought they were awful then; this was magnified when I saw clips of their out-of-tune rehearsals on news programmes and boosted to all new levels when I saw the final performance.
Peter Sissons on News 24 had to try and keep his obvious dislike of the song and disbelief that it was our entry out of his speech pattern when introducing the pre-contest reports; he failed miserably. He wasn’t the only one – Wogan at one point pointed out that “we deserve to come bottom four”, whilst complaining about “bloc voting”.
In fact, what’s interesting is that we’ve had eleven different winners for eleven contests since 1996 and telephone voting: including us (1997), Ireland (1996), Sweden (1999), Denmark (2000), Greece (2005) and Finland (2006) – all of which at least “think” Western Europe. That pretty much in itself disproves the Eastern Bloc voting theory – they may well all vote for each other, but that’s because they like the same sort of music and, what’s more, it’s not enough to win.
What wins is a song that people like. People liked Lordi. People liked the Serbian song this year: and, let’s face it, her song winning completely disproves the theory that people vote for Eurovision entries based on style. And the Ukrainian entry outdid us on comedy value – it actually felt hand-wrought and endearingly batty, while the Scooch song just felt like it was built on a camp assembly line. One of the men in the ‘band’ is a presenter on one of those Quiz Scam channels to pay the bills, and it’s that personality that came off the screen – made to a template of smarm.
People hated Scooch, hated Daz Sampson and hated everything we’ve put in since Katrina and the Waves. And I think it’s because they know that by putting that kind of entry in Eurovision, we’re patronising them – we think of Eurovision entries as if it was 1997, not 2007. They might not be very good at English lyrics but they have the same slick pop production values as us – if the Pet Shop Boys or Xenomania or Richard X were to produce a number for a Eurovision contender this year, they might at least have a chance. Hell, we should just get Robbie Williams to enter, he’s our most well known pop star on the Continent.
But this year’s Making Your Mind Up consisted entirely of washed-up failures and people who shouldn’t have been there – we’re looking third rate, but Eurovision demands first rate now (or at least a decent ripoff of first rate). It needs to change. Let’s have an entry we can be proud of for 2008 – we deserve one.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 