Eurovision: how to win it
Eurovision humiliation continues to blight Britain but there is a way to win it, writes Neil McCormick.
Engelbert Humperdinck prepares for Eurovision Song Contest Photo: REUTERS
1:00PM BST 28 May 2012
The BBC have tried just about everything in recent years to persuade Europe we are still a pop power to be reckoned with, bar actually sending a major star with a hit song. This, of course, is because no major star is foolish enough to taint themselves by association with such a naff and ridiculous competition.
So in the past five years, we’ve asked the nation to pin its minimal expectations on an X factor reject (Andy Abraham), a protégé of Andrew Lloyd Webber (Jade Ewen), an amateur talent show winner (Josh Dubovie), a reformed boy band (Blue) and a septuagenarian crooner (Engelbert Humperdinck). It’s the charge of the light entertainment brigade, as the BBC generals avert their gaze and send our troops to certain slaughter.
Is it any wonder we’ve become the laughing stock of the contest? Britain is only second to America as a global exporter of popular music, but when it comes to the Eurovision we somehow manage to sound about as cutting edge as the entrants from Belarus, only our English is worse.
So either we get out, and leave the Europeans to celebrate their annual parade of mediocrity. Or we get in it to win it. And there is a way.
I have been saying this for years, and no one at the BBC has paid the slightest attention, probably because the Eurovision is something they’d just rather not think about until it’s too late and they have to put in a call to see what Cliff Richard is up to this year. But I’ll lay it out one more time. This is how to win the Eurovision (or at least have fun trying).
We need a major contemporary British pop star to represent us. The problem is no one wants to do it, so we end up scanning the ranks of pop rejects and retirement homes and picking a plucky volunteer to fall on their dud grenade. We have to find a way to make the Eurovision cool, and to make it fun, and make it all for a good cause, so that stars are actually eager to take part.
So it has to be for charity, a big Princes Trust / Comic Relief style event, raising vast sums of money for a good cause. And if you want a whole bunch of established stars to take part, everyone has to be a winner. We would need a prime time TV show, run over a couple of weeks, with entrance by invitation only, in which British pop stars (and their usual writing and production teams) write and record their own idea of a song for Europe.
There would be a top celebrity panel (forget Simon Cowell, we want a shoot out between Bob Geldof, Elton John and Lily Allen, with Russell Brand as referee). Public voting would raise money for charity and the tracks themselves would immediately go on sale, guaranteeing every one of the acts involved a hit single. All for a good cause.
We need real talent involved, and while it might be too much to expect genuine worldbeaters Adele and Coldplay to block out time in their schedules, the combination of charity, celebrity and prime time TV should at least be enough to tempt genuinely popular artists of the calibre of Jessie J, Keane, Ed Sheeran, Marina And The Diamonds, Katy B, One Direction, Tinie Tempah and Tinchy Stryder, a couple of leftfield rock bands (The Horrors were made for European TV), an old fogey (Tom Jones is always looking for a hit), a rock legend (Morrissey is a Eurovision fan). If we could stir Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow into action, then maybe we’d actually have a chance of putting some points on the board.
Or maybe not. There have been research papers demonstrating how the demographics of Europe ensure that the UK would never win the popular vote again.
But even if we didn’t win, we would have regained the moral and artistic high ground, establishing a new form for the Song For Europe that might potentially produce some genuine entertainment and actual hit songs. Then we could retire gracefully from the Eurovision, and just run our own annual contest instead.
It’s either that, or get Cliff back on the case.
So it has to be for charity, a big Princes Trust / Comic Relief style event, raising vast sums of money for a good cause. And if you want a whole bunch of established stars to take part, everyone has to be a winner. We would need a prime time TV show, run over a couple of weeks, with entrance by invitation only, in which British pop stars (and their usual writing and production teams) write and record their own idea of a song for Europe.
There would be a top celebrity panel (forget Simon Cowell, we want a shoot out between Bob Geldof, Elton John and Lily Allen, with Russell Brand as referee). Public voting would raise money for charity and the tracks themselves would immediately go on sale, guaranteeing every one of the acts involved a hit single. All for a good cause.
We need real talent involved, and while it might be too much to expect genuine worldbeaters Adele and Coldplay to block out time in their schedules, the combination of charity, celebrity and prime time TV should at least be enough to tempt genuinely popular artists of the calibre of Jessie J, Keane, Ed Sheeran, Marina And The Diamonds, Katy B, One Direction, Tinie Tempah and Tinchy Stryder, a couple of leftfield rock bands (The Horrors were made for European TV), an old fogey (Tom Jones is always looking for a hit), a rock legend (Morrissey is a Eurovision fan). If we could stir Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow into action, then maybe we’d actually have a chance of putting some points on the board.
Or maybe not. There have been research papers demonstrating how the demographics of Europe ensure that the UK would never win the popular vote again.
But even if we didn’t win, we would have regained the moral and artistic high ground, establishing a new form for the Song For Europe that might potentially produce some genuine entertainment and actual hit songs. Then we could retire gracefully from the Eurovision, and just run our own annual contest instead.
It’s either that, or get Cliff back on the case.