Kate Chisholm

The power of song

Plus: the Roman Empire holds the key to modern Europe and what it means to be European

issue 14 May 2016

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how we might choose to vote in the coming referendum. Surely it’s just a string of naff pop songs stuck together with fake glitter and a lot of false jollity? The songs are uniformly terrible, the show so overproduced it’s impossible not to mock its grandiosity, the idea that it conjures up the meaning of Europe laughably misplaced. But in a programme for the World Service that caught my attention because it sounded so counterintuitive, Nicola Clase, head of mission at the Swedish embassy in London, tried to persuade us otherwise.

In The Swedish Ambassador’s Guide to Eurovision on Wednesday (just days before this year’s jamboree), she argued that it’s worth watching every year — not for the music but to find out the mood in Europe and what’s really going on behind the glacial smiles of those national representatives as they share out their votes.

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