The writing can be found on the remains of the Berlin Wall with the arrival of Justin Beberlake at last weekend’s Eurovision Song Contest.
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"Eurovision as we loved it is over".
Bugger world unification through music. I wanted Eurovision to stay daggy and glitzy. I wanted it to stay like it was in 1963, when Nana Mouskouri came 8th and hooked me into the vortex of Euro trash that gave the world ABBA and posed big questions, like: ``Do all Israeli women have great breasts, or, just the ones who get to Eurovision’’?
We got a taste of Eurovision-future when the audience favourite, a dodgy Russian pop-star, was beaten by a woman from the Crimea, representing the Ukraine.
The popular viewer vote was over-ruled by the Eurovision jury.
We also had the odd inclusion of Australia in the last three Eurovision contests?
Don’t get me wrong, Australia’s entrant Dami was the real Eurovision deal. IF only she was from Prague and not from south Brisbane.
Damn you SBS for the role you are playing in deconstructing a European icon
Eurovision is starting to smell a lot like FIFA; money is talking. And damn you SBS for the role you are playing in deconstructing a European icon. We don’t want the rest of the world at Eurovision.
As a teenager I used watch Eurovision highlights on my boyfriend’s colour tele.
As my own children grew – through the 90’s – we started to have our own little Eurovision parties.
The four person `parties’ went like this: bad pizza, liquorice allsorts, a block of Cadbury peppermint chocolate and a very late night. We loved the costumes and frankly the `reveals’ that made Australian fashion week look folksy.
As the children grew, the parties grew with the addition of exchange students from France, Sweden and Germany. Everyone dressed as their favourite country and brought a plate of their favourite European food from Nutella to hot chips (Belgium). Tres cheeky chick.
Watching Eurovision was like listening to Italian TV news on SBS on a Sunday morning or late night viewing of le Tour cyclists making their way across the European landscape. It was foreign.
Where else would a transgender performer with the name Conchita Wurst be confident enough to frock up with a beard. Even more so, where else would she win?
Where else would you find four, short, fat Russian grandmothers - the Buranovskiye Babushki - wowing a 38,000-strong crowd with their ethno pop sound and magically breaking down the historic European hatred of their motherland?
Even though we didn’t understand or even like much of what we saw, it was so, so different and so, so alive compared to the Americanised nature of Australian entertainment television.
Eurovision was unabashedly happy and full of joy. Sexy was legs and glitter, not violence or the degradation that is sadly still so much of non-European music video.
It’s a good thing Irish BBC radio dude Terry Wogan died in January.
He would not have liked a globalised Eurovision.
Wogan was the husky, comely and politically incorrect voice of Eurovision for Australia until SBS put Julia Zemero and Sam Peng up front and took the Europe out of (tele) vision.
Have none of them heard of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
Finally, how much do you think the Ukraine might have paid to win?