Jetlagged in the small-hour darkness of Santa Monica last week, and perusing various write-ups of the previous evening’s Eurovision Song Contest in Azerbaijan, I had a sudden epiphany as to why America holds all these sporting contests with ‘world’ in the title which don’t involve anybody else. It’s because everybody else is dreadful.
Eurovision has been dreadful for so long that this has almost become the point, and any act these days which doesn’t feature a singer who looks like the mistress of a warlord who can only visit the same countries as Roman Polanski doesn’t have a hope. When the whole shebang is being held in a country which is only very tenuously in Europe anyway, where a broad-knuckled hereditary dictator has given his whole capital a £600 million makeover in preparation, and has opted to put his own son-in-law on as the interval act, it feels no longer horribly wrong, but actually horribly right.
Britain doesn’t belong in such contests any more; whoever we send, they always give the impression of standing awkwardly in a corner, like Cliff Richard at one of Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga parties. You look at Eurovision, and you realise that the grown-up countries really don’t own the world any more. We’re being muscled out.
It’s a thought I’ve had before, but usually only in relation to sport. Remember that big freak-out Fifa had last year? When various global Alan Partridges spent a while indignantly denying accepting bribes, while simultaneously awarding the next two World Cup competitions to a pair of countries which contained nothing of note, football-wise, but which did contain lots of rich people and not much of a legal system? And it all seemed a bit suspect for some reason? Yes? Our worry should have been existential.
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