OPINION: A recent European championship produced a shock result, causing continent-wide catastrophising, soul-searching and rancour to dwarf that of most trade deals or football clashes.
Despite the fact that to win the annual competition marks one out as irredeemably naff, the Eurovision Song Contest is still passionately contested. It’s divisive to the point of striking a more resonant challenge to European unity than Brexit. Yet it’s the perfect projection of the European Union, because, as with the EU, every Eurovision decision seems to embarrass and annoy winning and losing nations alike, binding them ever more closely together.
With the event’s TV ratings being about as vertiginous as the complaints count, most countries enthusiastically embrace its peculiarities. It’s daft but it’s fun.
The winning songs are seldom more than mediocre hits, being chosen along similar lines to the Booker Prize. Anything catchy, innovative or in danger of becoming popular is spurned in favour of the entry that’s the most challenging – preferably to the point of pain and derangement.
But seldom are the winning songs profound or confronting like a Booker winner. They must be goofy, histrionic or sweetly banal – ideally all three. The dress code suggests there’s a secret European trove of 70s glam-rock costumes that get rationed out each year.
And as for the “Euro” dimension to this six-decade-old event, forget it. A finalist this year was from Israel, not widely known to be, or ever to have been, part of continental Europe. Similarly, Australia was once invited to enter, although its entry had the tact not to win, either.
Sweden won this year, but no matter who had won, it would have caused a furore.
Rules have been tightened after disqualification of rigged votes from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania and San Marino last year. All’s well that ends well: 2022′s eventual winner was the sentimental favourite, Ukraine’s entry.
How is it judged? Picky! There are doubtless officials in Brussels who can elucidate, but it’s hard for most mortals to grasp rules that say, for instance, any person from any country can vote up to 20 times, but not for their own country. Most Eurovision fans are happy to sit back and be agreeably appalled every year without the benefit of comprehension.
This sort of amiable collective non-meritocracy is the perfect shop window for the EU ethos, even though the two institutions aren’t formally linked. Look no further than the latest rules-updating bun fight over how to regulate the contents of a jam jar among the 27 EU countries.
The harm caused by jam with insufficient fruit ratios has yet to be disclosed. So far, Germany is reportedly in favour of more fruit, whereas France wants a feasibility study before deciding.
The minimum fruit content will likely rise from 350g to 450g/kg, with premium jam requiring at least 550g.
Marmalade’s 200g minimum is expected to remain unchanged – presumably because more citrus peel per kilo would make even Paddington Bear pucker up.
More ominously, the EU is proposing to officially allow the term “marmalade” – as distinct from “jam” – to address the apparent menace of the terms being confusingly interchangeable in some countries.
This can result only in at least two new transgressions being created: that of calling marmalade “jam” and that of calling marmalade “marmalade jam”.
Since fruit loses much of its nutrition when you boil the bejesus out of it with terrifying quantities of sugar, this may not be the food debate the EU should be prioritising.
To resort to some better-known past Eurovision winners: Making Your Mind Up about All Kinds of Everything is going to cause a lot of Boom Bang-a-Bang and risk an ultimate Waterloo if the EU really tries to micromanage and over-mystify what people put on their toast.
