What we learnt from Eurovision

Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during the performance of a hirsute, gurning, cod-operatic bellend from that patently European country Azerbaijan. ‘Putin’, my wife and I both reckoned, seeing as Russian hacker groups favourably disposed towards their country’s leader had promised that they would do what they could to disrupt the broadcast and indeed the voting.

If this really is the third world war, then I suppose it is a suitably banal and modernist take on universal annihilation – this yearly celebration of joyous gayness and very bad music suddenly part of the same war as the bloodshed, carnage and misery of Mariupol. And we, in the West, in our armchairs, with our bags of Doritos, keeping score on both counts: is it 30,000 Russian soldiers dead or 40,000 – and what have we done to the Greeks and the Australians that they wouldn’t give us a single point? The bizarre notion, too, of Putin actually watching this absurd extravaganza and cursing to himself like a cheap TV villain as the votes for Ukraine poured in.

And yet there are one or two correlations. Eurovision has been even more expansionist than Nato in recent years, the continent puffing itself up to include the former Soviet states of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova – and, when they are behaving themselves, Belarus. Not to mention, of course, Israel and Australia. And all those now independent countries once in the Warsaw Pact but now firmly part of western Europe and indeed Nato.

These are the other tanks parked by Putin’s back door, then, the culture tanks – Europe’s ATMOS 52-calibre howitzer blasting a fusillade of wokery and high camp towards Moscow and imploring: look, your former allies are all on board, why not join us? Initially tempted, the Russians did indeed get on board with the campery for a while and became quite good at it, winning the contest in 2008 with a truly godawful power ballad called ‘Believe’, produced by the Yankee rapper Timbaland.