A gay Irishman makes Eurovision a must-watch event

We caught the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday for the first time in years – and had a thoroughly good laugh. Frizzy perms, mullets, white jump-suits, gay male dancers gyrating away like that chap from the Pineapple Dance Studio, and female backing singers with instructions not to move a muscle: one presumes you have to be homosexual to choreograph Europop dance routines – hence the dearth of female dancers. 

Creepiest performer of the night was the 22-year old Serbian, Milan Stankovic, sporting the sort of blond pudding-bowl hair-do most chaps grow out of when they attain self-consciousness (around the age of five). God alone known what Radovan Karadic would make of him (a corpse, probably).

The bloke from Greece, in a white jumpsuit and black boots worn outside the trousers, had his hair coiffed into a ridge along the top of his head, which didn’t cover up the fact that he is receding rapidly. Both garnished aEuropop oompah beat with little Eastern flourishes: this is the sound of cheap package holidays. 

The Armenian entry, sung by a lovely, leggy girl, was called “Apricot Stone” - apricots carry great symbolic significance in the region - and the lyrics disconcertingly included words like “motherland” and “roots”. Iceland’sfemale singer was so vast, she should have been used to plug their erupting volcano. (As Graham Norton put it: “They gave us the Banking Crisis, volcanic ash - and now this!”) 

Best voice of the night belonged to a matronly Irish woman . Most anemic song/performer of the evening was the UK’s – what were they thinking? It came last -deservedly - we just can’t do this stuff any more. The most hilariously pompous performances of the night came from Russia (the singer kept bellowing at a drawing of a girl cupped in his right hand - at first, I thought he couldn’t remember the words) and some godawful soft-metal tossers from Turkey. Worst song was from Portugal, delivered by a girl singer employing those fantastically distracting vocal embellishments introduced into popular music by Aretha Franklin in the 1960s – think of any performance of “America the Beautiful” by any soul singer at any official event in the States during the past four decades, and you’ll know just what I mean.

The lady wife and I had a hankering for the French entry – a mixed gender/mixed race group doing their World Cup song which was very jolly – but our enthusiasm may have stemmed from relief at not having to watch white European males dancing badly:  Jessy Matador (I kid you not) and his chums looked like they were actually enjoying themselves.

The night produced two obvious winners. The first was Germany’s cute, flaky 19-year old pop chick, Lena, who sang the night’s most irritatingly catchy number, Satellite, already a mega-hit in Euroland. The words are in English, and it’s worth listening to, if only to savour the eccentric pronunciation employed throughout. But I warn you: hear it three times and it attaches itself to your brain like a limpet.

The other evident winner was Graham Norton (not a statement I imagined I’d ever find myself making). This was his first year as Wogan’s replacement – and  his gay bitchiness cut with Irish kindliness was simply perfect. 

Now, I admit I’ve refused to watch anything on TV featuring Norton for years – I’m not a big light entertainment fan in any case, and the desperate, relentless, tittering, smut-filled idiocy of his talk show actually made me feel queasy. But he redeemed himself on Saturday by so often wittily voicing the exact thoughts going through the heads of the audience watching in the UK. It’s doubtful that an English commentator could get away with taking the mick out of foreigners for over three hours without being repetitive and sounding mean, but this Irishman managed it. Norton was much sharper than the legend he has replaced, while retaining Wogan’s affectionate attitude towards the performers, no matter how weird they look, how bad they sound, or how cosmically ridiculous their choreography. 

Norton gave the performance of his career on Saturday and in the process made Eurovision a must-watch for the first time in decades. He has cost the license-payer a lot of money, and the BBC has shown great patience - and great ineptness - in trying to come up with the right vehicle  for him - but his double-act with Andrew Lloyd-Webber (the mind recoils) and now Eurovision suggest that the investment has finally paid off.

Trebles all round!