NewsLab

Don’t ask why, after two months of revising for exams, my first Saturday night of freedom ended up in front of an oversized television watching the results of the Eurovision Song Contest come in. For those of you who missed it (and honestly, I only saw the last half hour), the highlights include:

• Blind-making amounts of diamanté sparkle
• The highest concentration of chemically whitened teeth ever to be seen in a single television broadcast
• Tasteful background shots of either a). a well-lit bridge or b). a fountain in various capital cities
• Bare chested men in white trousers
• Bare legged women in leotards
• …and a blonde Russian man dancing on ice skates

Sweden voted for Norway, Denmark and Iceland, or was it Denmark that voted for Iceland, Norway and Sweden? That must have been the text votes working… Russia won, and the UK shared last place with Poland and Germany. Perhaps it’s possible to take the Eurovision Song Contest as a microcosm of new European identities - the keen assertiveness of Eastern Europe, the million-Euro growth of Russia as a super-power in musical creativity (it is, after all, Eurovision not European so the political borders are delicately stretched in the name of art), receiving maximum points from the former Soviet states of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Armenia.

No Western European country has won the contest for eight years, and there was a hint of bitterness as Terry Wogan, the BBC broadcaster who has provided ironic and acerbic commentary on the event since the 1970s, said as the final votes were coming in: “Western European participants have to decide whether they want to take part from here on in, because their prospects are poor.”

Though we like to sit here in smug old Britain and mock slightly mispronounced English lyrics, smoke-obscured fireworks, the occasional pair of too-tight trousers or continental hairstyles, the Eurovision Song Contest is a brilliantly and unpretentiously kitsch institution that does at the very least give a sense of one big ridiculous night unfurling across one huge geographical and cultural space. Perhaps we in the UK are just covering our own disappointment that we are no longer the centre of attention, let alone at the centre of Europe. As Terry says: “I’m afraid nobody loves the UK”.