Jump straight to Part One.

Although for the vast majority of people, watching the contest on television is the beginning and end of their Eurovision experience, for the true ESC diehard it is arguably the least important of all these seven stages. This is because the contest as it appears on TV always comes across as such a pale, two-dimensional summation of everything that we’ve been enjoying over the past few days (or weeks, or months).

The songs never sound quite right - pale facsimiles of the versions that we’ve become familiar with. The edits and camera angles never quite do full justice to the performances that we’ve witnessed on stage. The costumes and dance routines look cheesier and tackier. The presenters look stiffer, slower, more awkward. The video postcards look more irrelevant. The feverish, borderline-hysterical atmosphere in the hall is missing. The excitement has disappeared from the voting process. It’s really nothing like what we’ve all just experienced first hand.

What’s more: under the merciless glare of the camera and the microphone, the limitations of the performers become cruelly exposed. Nervousness, over-excitement, mad staring eyes, wonky fake smiles, crap dancing, breathlessness, bad timing, amateurishness and - most damningly of all - crummy, tuneless singing voices.

But enough about poor old Jemini. (Ker-TISH!) Well, except to say this: of course the UK’s nil points result had nothing to do with politics. For one simple reason: tele-voters are only able to vote for one song out of 26. By doing so, they aren’t able to reject any one song in particular – instead, they are rejecting 25 songs in equal measure. Yes, “political” voting quite demonstrably happens (the perennial Greece/Cyprus love-in being the most notorious example) – but only when people positively exercise a bias towards their favourite country. Political bias against the UK could only have happened in one situation: namely, if voters had decided that Cry Baby was their favourite song of the night, but that they would deliberately snub it in favour of their second favourite song, in order to register a protest. And on the basis of Jemini’s performance, just how likely a scenario was that?

OK, so maybe there are still a few more observations to make. Like Luca, I take issue with those who claimed that Gemma from Jemini was singing “out of key”. She was consistently keeping to the same key – it just wasn’t the actual key of the song. If you could have listened to her unaccompanied voice, acapella style, I reckon she would have sounded reasonable. My theory: in the heat of the moment, Gemma became too flustered to concentrate on the sound coming through her earpiece, and so panicked and chose the wrong key. A more experienced performer would have been able to overcome this, but our Gemma - with not much live stage experience to her name, beyond a few ropey club P.A.s - simply croaked. The look of fear on her face at the end of her song spoke volumes, I thought.

Mind you, Gemma-from-Jemini wasn’t the only performer to have difficulties keeping in tune. Far from it, in fact. Take t.A.t.u, for instance. Ouch! And they came third! Hey, maybe there was a conspiracy after all!

For UK viewers, there is one other crucial difference between live Eurovision and televised Eurovision: the presence of The Wogan. Who, as all but the most humourlessly obsessive ESC diehard must recognise, does a consistently brilliant job of saying exactly what everybody is thinking at home, and undercutting what little solemnity there is with his gently devastating commentary. In particular, The Wogan nailed one aspect of this year’s shebang with precise accuracy. Namely, that all this year’s frantically busy dance routines were in danger of eclipsing the actual singers and the actual songs. I guess that this was inevitable, given that Latvia won last year’s contest with a wholly unremarkable song, purely on the strength of an extremely cleverly conceived dance routine (remember all that gender confusion and shedding of costume?)

This in turn helped me to solve one of the big post-match questions: why did Belgium do so well? Watching the show at home, the answer became obvious – because they played it comparatively straight with their performance, letting the music do all the work. In the midst of all that breathless gimmickry, Urban Trad’s Sanomi actually came across as a welcome respite. Restrained and dignified, if you ignored the fact that it was sung in an “invented language” (I was hoping for Klingon). Ooh, proper music at last! said half of Europe, sighing with relief. The half of Europe with CDs by Clannad, or Sacred Spirit, or Adiemus, or Deep Forest, or Secret Garden, or Enigma, or Enya. You know the type – naff taste, but they’re bloody everywhere, and on Eurovision night they rose up and spoke with one clear voice.

Which just goes to show the difference – nay, the yawning chasm! – between the typically casual ESC viewer and the typically obsessive ESC fan. If only the voting could be left to us. Those couple of hundred million “Stage Seven” lightweights out there – what do they know, anyway? Hijacking our contest with their half-baked, ill-informed choices...heathens! It's all wasted on them, I tell you!

And that, my weary fellow travellers, concludes the Troubled Diva Eurovision coverage for this year, as I reluctantly attempt to re-adjust to post-ESC reality once again. Right now, Istanbul seems so very, very far away...

Supplementary material:
· Audio Post #1
· Audio Post #2

Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

(It's a long one, folks. Grab a cup of tea and make yourselves comfortable.)

If Eurovision 2003 could have been scored purely on the basis of how frequently the chorus of each song was sung by our merry little group of six, as we wandered round Riga in the blazing hot sunshine on the afternoon of Finals Day, then our votes would have looked something like this:

12 points - Latvia. “Cause this is gonna be the day that we will meet, when heaven comes so down to Earth to say hello from Mars…”

Towards the end of the afternoon, a “street team” from the Mars confectionary company suddenly blitzed the Old Town, handing out hundreds of black balloons bearing the words “Hello From Mars”, in the same lettering as the well known chocolate bar. Which was a canny cross-promotional tie-in, if ever there was one. We wondered whether this might start a trend for future contests: Hello From Snickers? Fly On The Wings Of Starburst? One More Twix?

10 points - Germany. “Let’s get happy and let’s be gay, all our troubles they will fade away…”

“Oh, so does the word gay mean something else, then? We didn’t know that – we’re from foreign. We just thought we were writing a cute little song about being happy. Well, how crazy!”

8 points - Ukraine. “Hasta la vista baby, baby so long…”

“Can’t wait to see the contortionist he’s got with him – she’s on a box, you say?”
“I think it could still win, you know.”
“No, no, bottom five for sure…”

7 points - UK. “Cry cry baby, you lied to me baby, I’ll survive without you baby…”

Our attention turned in disbelief to the second half of the lyrics, as printed in the programme. Allow me to quote them in full: Cry cry baby / (Oh no) / Cry cry baby / (I don’t wanna cry) / Cry cry baby / Baby bye baby bye bye / (Byeeeeeeee) / Ooooh baby / Bye Bye / (Oh yeah) / Oh baby bye bye / Cry Baby / Cry Baby / Cry Baby / Cry Baby / Cry Baby.

“There’s only the one verse at the beginning…and then it’s just…nothing!”
“They’re just picking words at random!”
“And they’ve completely given up by the end; they’re just hitting Control-V to fill up the space.”
“I know they wrote it in a phone box, but did the money run out after the first 30 seconds?”
“Control-V! Control-V! Control-V!”

I pitied the guy we met during the afternoon, who had been commissioned to write a 600 word piece on Jemini by Sunday afternoon, for their local newspaper in Liverpool. What sort of positive spin could he possibly find? Oh well – maybe they’d do OK and surprise us all. Although we strongly doubted it.

6 points - Turkey. “Everyway that I can, I’ll try to make you love me again…”
(Dum bi-dum bi-dum oo-wee oo-wee-um, dum bi-dum bi-dum oo-wee oo-wee-um…)

5 points - Slovenia. “He sang to me nananana, so naturally he set my heart on FYE-YA, he truly was my one DIZ-EYE-YA…”
(We had great fun deconstructing the full lyric to this song, concluding that poor little Karmen was misconstruing events rather badly. But let’s not go into all of that here.)

4 points - Ireland. “We’ve got the world tonight, let’s hold on together…”
(Which would always get me singing Fly On The Wings Of Love directly afterwards. The two tunes do bear more than a passing familiarity, after all.)

3 points - Austria. “Und die Frau Holle hatt gern die Wolle vom Dromedar aus Afrika…”
(Actually, I think that one might have been just me.)

2 points - Spain. “Oh o-o-oh!”
(Much as we loved Dime, one of the few ESC songs to be played down at Club XXL every night, we couldn’t manage to sing much more of the tune than this – try as we might. Too many unfamiliar words to fit into the chorus. Most successful ESC tunes do not make this mistake. As you might have noticed over the years.)

1 point - Poland. “Keine Grenzen, keine Fahnen…”
(Which translates as: no borders, no flags. And this was an entry for an international song contest, with 26 countries directly competing with each other in a hall that would be filled with flags? The irony was not lost on us.)

Word was also filtering back to us that the short-dark-haired-one from t.A.T.u had not even shown up for that afternoon’s dress rehearsal, still supposedly “on doctor’s orders”. During the week, the powers that be had let it be known that if Lena and Yulia decided to indulge in any rampantly explicit lesbotic activity on stage during the finals, then transmission would immediately switch to the pre-recorded dress rehearsal performance. Except that now, there was no footage to switch to. Meaning that the girls could potentially do, ooh, anything they liked! A tactical master-stroke, we thought.

On the other hand, no-one from the t.A.T.u camp had ever actually suggested that explicit lesbotic raunchiness might be on the menu. Which said more about press perceptions of their “outrageous” act than it did about the act itself (who have never actually claimed to be “proper” lesbians themselves, in any case). Media manipulation of which Malcolm McLaren would have been proud, in other words. (Indeed, there was even an article in last month’s issue of The Face in which McLaren fawningly interviewed t.A.T.u’s manager, praising his media tactics to the rafters).

My biggest blushes of the day came when one of our gang, while flicking through my copy of the official programme, came to the feature on t.A.T.u – whose pages had become completely stuck together. “Mike! What on earth have you been up to in that hotel room of yours?” My protestations that the pages were heavily laminated, and that it had been very hot in the hall last night, fell on gleefully deaf ears.

(I also know another story, involving a mistimed dose of Viagra, a recalcitrant cockring, a bumpy taxi ride over cobblestones, and the airport-style metal detectors at the entrance to the Skonto hall. But maybe this is neither the time nor the place. You’ll have to make up your own.)

My worries over the rudimentary facilities at the Skonto hall were immediately dispelled on arrival for the Saturday night finals. Marquees had been erected outside, selling drinks and a variety of tasty smorgasbord-style snacks. As a result, the whole of the entrance area became one vast al fresco garden party, with flags waving, cameras snapping, nationalities bonding and vodka flowing. Not wanting to miss a second of the 26 songs – a decidedly long haul for anyone to contemplate, and one that couldn’t possibly be attempted sober – we had all decided to be “sensible”, and stick to vodka. Neat vodka. Sold in 100 gram measures, with all of us downing at least three before the show. My my, but it was effective.

Which would probably explain our, um, exuberant behaviour that night. Dear me, Brits on the piss, eh? It’s always the same! Although the colossal delegation from Ireland certainly gave us a run for our money – their entrant, Mickey Harte, was the winner of an Irish approximation of Fame Academy, and seemingly half of his home town had flown out to support him. In fact, besides the exuberant and ubiquitous Irish, the massed ranks of close-cropped gentlemen of a certain age from London, a clump of agreeably enthusiastic young Estonians and a gaggle of Germans in red wigs (in honour of their scarlet-maned entrant, Lou), representatives of other nationalities were much thinner on the ground. Where were Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia, for instance?

Inside the hall, we soon spotted the BBC commentary box, conspicuously bedecked with Union Jacks, and scooted up to pay homage to The Wogan. As luck would have it, The Wogan had already emerged from his box, and was holding court with a bunch of similarly over-excited acolytes. Two of our gang had brought some peculiar little electronic gizmos with them, which, when spun in a circle above one’s head, spelt out messages in red LED text. Viewed from a distance in dark surroundings, it looked as though the words were mysteriously floating in mid-air. They had now been programmed to spell out WE LOVE YOU TERRY and WOGAN FOR PM.

“Coo-ee! Terry! Over here! Look!”
God, we were subtle. The great man finally noticed.
“Actually, I’m beginning to feel quite moved now.”
Ah, that trademark laconic wit! We swooned.

After a few more minutes of general banter with the throng, The Wogan announced his retreat.
“Well, at least you lot will be spared from having to listen to my commentary tonight.”
Oh, the twinkly-eyed gentle self-deprecation! Eurovision wouldn’t be Eurovision without!

Last year, I gave you a detailed song-by-song critique of every entry, as performed on the night. This year, I fear such a task is beyond me, with the 26 songs passing by in a delirious vodka-fuelled blur. For this is how I see it: if the rehearsals are for chin-stroking, connoisseur-style evaluation of each song’s chances, then the finals are for putting all critical faculties on hold, going stark staring bonkers, singing and dancing in the aisles (there was a pleasing lack of heavy-handed security, and the aisles were nice and wide this year), flag-twirling, whooping, screeching and generally Surrendering To The Madness. I expect that you get much the same sort of thing at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party. (Yes, it's to time wheel out that hoary old chestnut, The Strange Cultural Affinity Between Teenage Girls And Gay Men. See Juile Burchill columns passim.)

Besides which, we couldn’t see the stage too well from where we were, and were relying on the giant video screens instead. In which case, you make your own entertainment, don’t you?

This means that no, most of our group didn’t quite realise just how badly Jemini performed. We were far too busy to notice at the time. Although, after duly whooping and screeching our appreciation, we did all turn to each other at the end and mutter “Well, that was crap, wasn’t it?” before returning to our seats (only to jump up again a few seconds later for Hasta La Vista Baby).

Indeed, the only time I noticed a vocalist struggling somewhat was towards the end of Turkey’s performance, as poor Sertab Erener became quite out of breath from all that belly dancing and frock twirling. Ooh dear, that won’t help her chances, I said to Chig, thinking back to the fiasco of Sweden's over-excited Afro-dite the previous year. How little we know, eh?

And as for t.A.T.u – I was so excited to see Lena and Yulia together on stage at last, in costume, actually singing, and giving a full performance, with fantastically effective staging and lighting in the hall, after a week in which they had consistently acted like stroppy little madams, pissing all and sundry off big time, that I became quite beside myself with the excitement of the moment. In fact, I even surprised myself with just how much excitement I was capable of. A Hard Day’s Night will make so much more sense to me now. None of this stopped large proportions of the crowd from booing, however - which merely added to the moment (as I had by now decided that everything to do with t.A.T.u over the week had been one gigantic neo-situationist prank. Which might, in retrospect, have been more than a slight exaggeration). As for that much-vaunted rampant lesbotic activity, it didn’t extend much beyond a slight stroking of the hair. Which I decided served everybody jolly well right for their prurience.

Other highlights included:

· Spotting Ireland’s Mickey Harte brushing away real tears while singing the appropriately titled We’ve Got The World Tonight in front of a couple of hundred of his nearest and dearest (going joyfully mental in the aisles as only the Irish can), plus a packed Skonto Hall, plus a couple of hundred million TV viewers. Well, under the same circumstances, I might have become quite moist myself.

· An elegantly powerful, stately performance from Portugal’s Rita Guerra, of a song which I hadn’t rated at all up until now, which actually sent proper shivers up and down my spine (and to think she had been yesterday’s toilet break!) Mind you, I had probably reached the Sentimental Stage with my vodka consumption by then.

· Chig and I bounding forwards to join the Estonian posse during Eighties Coming Back, which I finally decided I quite liked after all (having finally exorcised myself of all lingering Vanilla Ninja based resentment). Although perplexingly described in some quarters as this year’s “indie” entrant, I thought it sounded more like Voyager’s Halfway Hotel, a minor hit from 1979 with some strong sentimental memories attached. (Oh, and while I’m about it: Mister Norway bore strong overtones of Dean Friedman/Eric Carmen, and the intro to Slovenia’s Nanana was a dead ringer for Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf.)

· The back of the stage opening up to reveal the Green Room, with the contestants floating above us all, Mount Olympus like, in a sea of turquoise clouds. From where we were, this came across as a great coup de theatre.

· The scoring. Oh God, the scoring! In classic ESC style, everything came down to the very last vote of the very last country. By this time, all we cared about was: where do we all want to go next year? The choice had boiled down to Moscow (not fussed, thanks) Brussels (hey, I could get to meet Quarsan and Zed!) and Istanbul (yes please). So Istanbul 2004 it is, then. Result!

For the rest of the night, and for most of the rest of the following day, the same two questions were asked over and over again by all and sundry: why did Latvia (one of everyone’s favourites) do so badly, and why did Belgium (almost nobody’s favourite) do so well? We were all quite perplexed. Why Latvia? Why Belgium? It almost became our collective mantra.

There would be only one way to find out. Roll on Stage 7.

Jump to next part.

Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

OK, so maybe blagging press accreditation for the whole week might be a stage too far. I’m just about prepared to let you off on that one. But to come all the way over to Riga, only to listen to the songs being performed once? What’s that all about? Rehearsal tickets have been easy to come by for the last couple of years at least (Chig got hold of them for me on the day both times), so there’s really no excuse for such blatant slacking.

The point of attending one of the full dress rehearsals (either on Friday night or Saturday afternoon) is this. With a considerably less frenzied, more restrained atmosphere in the hall, this is your opportunity to make a sober, considered, objective assessment of everybody’s chances. You can assess the dance routines, evaluate the vocal abilities (or lack of them), appraise the costumes, and carefully evaluate the lighting, staging, camera angles and video editing for each act. Like the seasoned connoisseur that you are.

Watching a rehearsal also has the benefit of keeping you in the conversational loop with all the other ESC fans, as you all breathlessly swap predictions afterwards. Who is this year’s dark horse? Who is the fan favourite that will flop? Which is the one you personally love, that is just “too classy” for Eurovision? Which is the one that you loathe (“such a tired old cliché - we should have moved on from this sort of thing by now”), even though you just know it’s going to do really well? Which is the one that you hadn’t liked much at first, “but it’s really started to grow on me now, and it might yet surprise us all”? Which is that one that you “just don’t know, it could go either way, top five or bottom five I reckon”? Who is this year’s top male totty? Whose act is so ridiculously cheesy that you just know that it’s destined to appear on “ironic” video-clip compilations for years to come?

(This year’s answers, purely on the strength of the Friday night rehearsal, were as follows. Austria, Latvia, Iceland, Germany & Sweden, Ireland & Estonia, Ukraine, the Cypriot backing singer, Israel.)

And what about bloody t.A.T.u., eh? Eh? With the short-dark-haired one mysteriously absent (on “doctor’s orders” – yeah, right), it was left to the longer-frizzy-haired one to perform Ne Ver’, Ne Bojsia alone on stage, out of costume. A half-hearted, static, rather forlorn performance, which was roundly booed before, during and afterwards, it did however heighten expectations for the next day. No-one had actually seen the duo give a proper performance all week. What game were they playing? What rampantly raunchy lesboticisms were they hiding up their sleeves?

One thing was abundantly clear, though: the UK’s entry was bloody awful. Crap song (which runs out of what few ideas it has after about the first minute), embarrassingly amateurish performance. Maybe not bottom three (my predictions being for Malta, Bosnia and Croatia), but not far off.

There was a worrying lack of bar facilities in the hall (Chig and I queuing at least 25 minutes for our second beer), and a seemingly total lack of inside toilets (a row of rock-festival style portaloos outside, thoroughly unsuitable for the High Glamour of the occasion). However, the hall looked good – small enough for everyone to get at least a reasonable view, with a good acoustic and a decidedly impressive stage set. Despite only getting my ticket a couple of hours earlier, I had lucked out with the seating – dead central, main floor, four rows behind the mixing desk, with a perfect view of the stage, and close enough to be able to see the facial expressions of the performers. Knowing that the following night’s seats wouldn’t be as good as this, I made the most of my good fortune, and resisted watching the performances on the two large video screens as best as I could.

I still had absolutely no idea who was going to win, though. One of the strongest starts to the contest in years (Iceland, Austria, Ireland & Turkey), but surely nothing from the beginning of the draw could possibly succeed with the tele-voters? Russia were still an unknown quantity. Norway’s droopy ballad worried me enormously. Everybody kept banging on about Poland’s frightful peace anthem, but I thought that the performance was false and the male vocal too ridiculously rasping. Spain would be a dream ticket – I loved it – but maybe it was too much of a groove, and not enough of a song? Portugal and Belgium had been my toilet breaks: too boring, not a chance. Nope – just like last year, I didn’t have a clue. The field was wide open.

Jump to next part.

Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

So you’ve booked your trip to Riga, but you’re only flying out to watch the contest on the Saturday night? Lightweight! A true ESC-head would have sorted out press accreditation for the entire week. After all, how else are you going to get hold of all the latest essential gossip from the rehearsals, press conferences and parties?

What do you mean, it’s not essential? Of course it is! Freshly minted gossip is your stock in trade, and the competition is fierce. For instance (and to take a fictional example), if you eagerly boast of having seen one of the Estonian backing dancers wandering round the Dom Square that afternoon, then someone else is bound to tell you that actually, he sat next to the same guy at lunch in the Press Centre yesterday (“and he’s a really really nice bloke, so down to earth…”) – at which point someone else will pipe up that actually, he has just interviewed the guy for his website (“and I’ve got some great photos of him as well…”) – which will lead someone else to say that actually, he was snogging the guy at the official Croatian party last night – and so on, and so on. Although admittedly, snogging one of the contestants does just about trump everything.

What’s that, you say - you’re not a journalist? Oh, come come - you can do better than that. Do you really think that all those important looking people with their laminated press passes slung round their necks at all times, even when they’re miles away from the Skonto hall are all proper journalists? How much you have to learn! Because for the truly dedicated, there are ways, and there are means. Start badgering your local paper or radio station, and take it from there. Build up your contacts. Sooner or later, your persistence will be rewarded.

Once again, this is one Stage Of Eurovision too far for me – besides which, I’ve always been a hopeless schmoozer. I’d only get star-struck and tongue-tied - yes, even in front of that Estonian backing dancer. After all, he’s going to be on the telly, isn’t he? That still counts as famous in my book. However, I do know this guy who does have press accreditation, and he’s got some great photos of the Latvian entrants, and perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, but the head of the BBC delegation told him only yesterday that…

Jump to next part.

Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

(Yes, I know: it’s all getting a bit, hmm, what’s the word, leery on Troubled Diva right now, isn’t it? Are we lurching downmarket in pursuit of cheap hits? Or are we alienating our more elevated readership, who are all shaking their heads in sorrow and clicking off in distaste? Well, one can only go with the flow. And this is a story worth telling.)

Sunday afternoon, the day after the Eurovision finals, and four of us decide to take the short train ride out to the coast at Jurmala. Alighting at Majori station in blazing hot sunshine, we discover a long strip of shops and pleasant cafés, thronged with promenading Rigans who have journeyed out for the day. The beach is a short walk away, down a street which is lined with rather fine looking clapboard houses (holiday homes for the urban elite, maybe?) It turns out to be a broad strip of perfect golden sand, stretching out to infinity in either direction, delightfully unspoilt and under-developed, with plenty of room to spread out, flop, and ogle at the scores and scores of absurdly attractive Latvian chaps strolling past.

In fact, this whole Fit Latvian Dude thing is getting quite surreal now, and we have become quite giggly about it. Is this some sort of cleverly staged initiative, launched by the Latvian Tourist Board in order to get the massed ranks of Eurovision queens (half of whom have media connections of some description or other) squealing about the place when they get home? Has every ridiculously handsome young Latvian in the country been recruited to parade around the city in tight clothing, or along the beach in their skimpy little shorts? It’s the only remotely plausible explanation that we can come up with.

Gazing out at the Gulf of Riga, we become aware of some sort of animal in the water, maybe about fifty metres away, where the sea is still quite shallow. As we notice it, so does everyone else around us on the beach. A crowd begins to gather at the water’s edge. The creature is remaining completely still. What is it, anyway? The Latvian Nessie? A sea-lion? An otter? Eventually, we conclude that it must be a beaver, which must have swum too far up the estuary and has now become stranded in the sea. Poor little beaver. It looks at us, and we look at him, and nobody moves.

Suddenly, we realise to our great surprise that a great big fire engine has pulled up on the beach behind us, just a few feet away from the water’s edge. A fire engine on the beach?

Before we know it, two strapping young firemen have jumped out of the vehicle. Oh my God, Latvian firemen!

They have stripped down to their underwear. Oh my God, Latvian fireman in their pants!

Ordering us to stand well back, and with one of them clutching a thick grey blanket, they wade out into the waist-deep water. Oh my God, Latvian firemen in wet pants!

(Meanwhile, just as a little side-show to the main action, their driver is, with much languid stretching - ooooh, it’s just too hot to be wearing this sticky uniform one moment longer - slowly stripping down to the waist. I scarcely know which way to look.)

Very slowly, the two firemen approach the beaver, one on either side, taking great care not to startle it with any sudden movements. Once they are close enough, one fireman quickly throws his blanket on top of the animal, while the other runs forward and scoops it up in his arms, to hearty applause from the crowds.

The pair then jog back up to the beach, and - without even towelling themselves down - jump straight into the cabin of their vehicle. The fireman nearest me is now sitting there, glistening in his damp pants, with a dripping wet beaver on his lap. (Hello Google!) Just before closing the door, he looks straight towards me and smiles a broad, winning smile, revealing perfect white teeth. Delighted by this attention, I beam straight back at him (hmm, must be better at holding my stomach in than I thought) - before realising that standing directly in front of me are three amply bosomed young beauties in bikinis, who are gazing adoringly up at him, hands clasped together in perfect “my hero!” poses. Ah well. Can't have it all my own way, I suppose.

As the fire engine speeds away, I can’t help feeling that I have just been an extra in a particularly cheesy episode of Baywatch: Beaver Patrol. I can even picture the script meeting:

OK, so we’ll have some sort of cute drowning animal - let’s make it a beaver, OK? And then these firemen dudes show up - and then they strip off, and - whaddya mean, firemen don’t rescue beavers? Look, schmuck, they do on this show!

We trust you have enjoyed this little homo-erotic fantasy interlude. We will now return you to the Seven Stages Of Eurovision without further ado.

Jump to next part.

Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

So you were planning on watching the contest in front of the telly, or at your mate’s Eurovision party, or on a big screen at a public venue? Oh, please! Make an effort! If you want to be where the real action is, then get yourselves out to the host city. To this end, it’s best to book your flight tickets and make your hotel reservations well in advance. (We’ll be sorting out next year’s flights to Istanbul as soon as the dates of the contest are confirmed.)

And let me tell you, as a veteran of four Eurovisions and counting, that the effort is worth it. If nothing else, then it can be a perfect excuse for spending a few days in an interesting new city – and in this respect, Riga 2003 (like Tallinn 2002 before it) exceeded expectations. It’s a truly charming city, with a beautiful Old Town district in its centre (now a UNESCO World Heritage site), full of medieval churches and containing the highest concentration of Jugendstil (German-style Art Nouveau) architecture anywhere in Europe. As well an abundance of good, cheap, lively places to eat and drink, particularly around two of the main squares, which had been set up with stages and giant screens for the Saturday night final. You could feel the buzz of expectation in the air as you walked around - especially on Saturday afternoon, with all of your gang dressed in red white and blue, merrily waving Union Jack flags and balloons, having your photos taken on every street corner, and bumping into fellow ESC fans seemingly every few minutes.

Which leads me on to the other wonderful thing about travelling away for Eurovision: the camaraderie of the fellow ESC fan. Oh, we’re quite the little community, you know! I said it last year and I’ll say it again this year: the prevailing atmosphere – in the hotels, on the streets, in the squares, in the bars and cafés, and particularly at Club XXL later on – reminds me of Week One at university, with everyone happily introducing themselves to each other, and launching straight into animated conversations about this year’s crop of entries. There are no strangers at Eurovision - just friends you haven't met yet.

Ah yes, Club XXL: Riga’s main gay venue, and our final destination for three of our four nights in the city. Bar at the front, club at the back, with the two linked together by a dark corridor, with many even darker doorways leading off it. A corridor which was bedecked with the words F*** ME in large fluorescent lettering, lest you should be in any lingering doubt as to its purpose. In other words, the big sleazy cruising zone was also the venue’s main thoroughfare. Clever planning, n’est-ce pas?

(I have one story to tell you about this area, and one story only. The story of the rather over-refreshed and over-excited Englishman who espied the rather promising looking Latvian lurking in a semi-lit and semi-private place. The Latvian who, after a couple of minutes of wordless introductory grappling, looked gruffly up at the Englishman and grunted “How much you pay?” The Englishman who - hastily gathering himself together - replied, in his haughtiest, most withering tones: “My love is free. Goodbye.” The Englishman who, striding back out into the corridor with all the bruised but righteous dignity he could muster, was sure that this deadly riposte would now be causing the Latvian to re-assess his entire position in life. Even if this new-found righteous dignity was rather undercut by the fact that he still hadn’t quite finished gathering himself back together. Ahem.)

Another unexpectedly delightful feature of Latvia was the stunning physical beauty of its young men and women. (Latvia is apparently quite famous for this, but no-one had warned us in advance.) Well, I say “…and women” in a vain attempt to be fair, but I’m actually extrapolating here. In reality (and I'm well aware of what a sad old lech this is going to make me sound like, but if you had been there, then you would understand), it was quite impossible for any of us to tear our eyes away from the endless procession of heartbreakingly handsome, Slavic-meets-Germanic, tough-but-tender, slender-yet-defined, long-legged, close-cropped, neatly groomed 18 to 25 year old lads, in their ubiquitous uniform of tight sleeveless tops and equally tight trousers (they all looked so gay!), all blissfully unaware of their beauty. (Which was, in any case, the norm rather than the exception over there.) I’m not even generally given to paying such close attention to guys under the age of 30, but there was no getting away from the reality of the situation. (That was the other weird thing: over the age of 25, all this beauty suddenly melted away. We even started to ask ourselves: where were all the men in the their thirties and forties? One began to feel that they had all been spirited away, Logan’s Run style.)

Perhaps I should break off and mention the Surreal Baywatch Episode at this juncture. Yes, I think I’ll do that next.

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Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

So you were intending to wait until the night of the contest itself before hearing the songs for the first time? Unthinkable! Songs of this quality and depth have to be played and replayed endlessly over the preceding couple of months, so that every vocal inflection, every rhythmic twist, every lyrical subtext – in short, every last nuance - may be teased out, studied, analysed and hotly debated. Just like the national finals, this song-grabbing process can take many hours, spread over several weeks, as you feverishly trawl through fan sites, mailing lists and file-sharing services in order to accumulate your stash of MP3s.

You will typically start off with rough quality MP3s of the live performances from the national finals, as often as not still in the native language of the country concerned. Next come the re-recorded studio versions, which might have been translated into English for the sake of broad international appeal. Hopefully, there also will be at least one dance remix to track down, for that fantastic non-stop ESC party mix that you’re planning to burn to CD.

If all this piracy bothers your sense of ethics, then you might also want to place orders for each of the officially released singles, as they appear in each country. Yes, you too can experience the thrill of picking your way uncertainly through the ordering procedures of almost impenetrably complex foreign language websites, maybe running the risk of accidentally ordering the whole album instead of just the single (as I once did in the case of Sweden’s Charlotte Nilsson).

Next come the preview videos, as broadcast by each of the participating nations. Except for the nasty old UK of course, who limit this to showing incomplete excerpts of each song, spread over five nights on BBC3 in the week before the contest. This therefore means doing clever things with satellite decoders, in order to intercept the foreign transmissions. Alternatively (or in addition), you can make the pilgrimage to the Retro Bar in London, for their big preview video screening night.

Finally (and this is generally where the more faint-hearted ESC fans first join in), you can buy the official compilation CD, as released on the Monday before the contest. In this way, you still have the chance to be word and note perfect by the time that Saturday night comes around.

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Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003

So you thought that the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) experience began and ended with the twenty-six songs that were performed in Riga on Saturday night? Oh dear me, no. They’re just the tip of the iceberg. For the truly committed (and I choose my words carefully here), it is also necessary to watch the national pre-selection finals. And I don’t just mean the national finals from one’s home country, either (such as our own effort, A Song For Europe). No - to prove your mettle as a true ESC diehard, you should also make every effort to watch as many of the other national finals as you possibly can (such as Sweden’s Melodifestivalen and Croatia’s DORA). As most (if not quite all) of the 26 participating countries hold these finals, and as the average number of songs in each final is around 10, then…well, you do the maths. It’s a major commitment, with hours and hours of punishing video footage to plough through. An endless grim parade of Bosnian Britneys, Cypriot Celines, Dutch Dariuses, Estonian Enriques and Maltese Mariahs pass before your eyes, with only the occasional flash of brilliance along the way. Like sifting for gold, in a dispiritingly thick swamp of sludge.

(Lest you should think otherwise: the odd song or two aside, this is actually one of the very few Stages Of Eurovision to which I cannot bring myself to subscribe. The madness has to be stopped somewhere along the line, after all.)

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Labels: eurovision, eurovision2003