No more useless bands: Let our political leaders slug it out in the next Eurovison Song Contest
While I’m writing this the Eurovision Song Contest is live on air in God knows how many living rooms all over Europe - and in Israel. Israel, as we all know, is part of Europe, sort of. When it comes to nauseating pop songs anyway. When it comes to the more messy stuff of day to day politics and survival they’re on their own, of course. Then the whole of Europe tends to look the other way, shuffles its collected feet and says, ‘Not my beat, guv.’
Which perfectly sums up my feelings about the whole stupid Eurovision Song Contest: definitely not my beat. So, why write about it at all? Well, because, like Baldrick, I suddenly came up with this cunning plan: Why not do away with all those stupid bands and solo singers and let our elected leaders slug it out on stage instead?
It would be brilliant: All those presidents and prime ministers, dressed like your typical Eurovision lead singers, with those Song Contest hair-does, spouting out those stupid lyrics like so many, badly rhyming political manifestos. I would buy a big screen plasma TV just to be able to watch this yearly(!) show in style and comfort.
Wouldn’t it be great to see and hear England’s Gordon Brown sing that old Sinatra favourite ‘My way’: “Regrets, I have a few.”
It would be easy for France’s president Sarkozy. Rumour has it that his wife is recording a new album, on which she sings a song about giving a blow job to her husband. I’m not suggesting that the two of them would perform that particular song on stage - oh well, whom am I kidding: Of course I would want them to do that.
Germany’s Angela Merkel. though? That’s a tough one. She’s not really Eurovision Song Contest material. You can’t see her as a Spice Girl. Hell, she’s got ‘material’ enough to form all of the Spice Girls and have enough left to build one or two Little Jimmy Osmonds. Okay, so maybe it is easy after all: She can perform Madonna’s ‘Material girl’.
Ah, so many European leaders, so many songs, so little time - but it would be fun to have them compete in such a contest. They might be tempted to agree to do it too, you know. Berlusconi singing ‘I am the walrus’ and Serbia’s Boris Tadić, with ‘Happiness is a warm gun’ (to stick to the Beatles theme in this paragraph) would certainly get more voters out performing on stage than during those boring, political elections.
On a personal level, I would find it intensely gratifying to see our own Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende first work his way through a tepid version of ‘Send in the clowns’ before gathering his well-deserved ‘nil points’ from every voting European country.
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May 26th, 2008 at 18:50
[...] Not that I give a hoot about the childish antics of the ‘Behead those who insult the peace of Allah (or some such)’ fanatics - au contraire. Let the rabble riot in the streets, says I. It beats having to watch the Eurovision Song Contest (of which I wrote earlier.) [...]