Comment When music and politics collide...
Crimea following its 2014 annexation by Russia, was predictably banned from entering Ukraine.
Whereupon Russia withdrew and refused to take the ESC broadcast.
This week in Lisbon, however, following a pledge in Vladimir Putin’s presidential election manifesto, the Russians are back, with the same Samoylova, but a different song – though I may have imagined the manifesto bit.
At which news, Monty Python fans may have recalled Eric Idle’s 1970 Communist Quiz, in which he put general knowledge questions to contestants Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung.
All four having failed to spot the trick question – the year Coventry City last won the FA Cup (remember, it was 1970 and the Sky Blues’ Wembley triumph came in 1987!) – Lenin’s starter for ten was to name the song with which the UK’s Teddy Johnson and Pearl Carr won the 1959 Eurovision Song Contest.
He couldn’t, allowing Mao to buzz and volunteer ‘Sing, Little Birdie’, which was adjudged correct. An inspired intervention by the Great Helmsman, though tough on a possibly flustered Lenin, who might well have known that the Birdie song didn’t in fact win in 1959 but became the first of the UK’s now record 15 runners-up.
All jolly fascinating, you’ll agree – but, even with the Sky Blues reference, it wouldn’t have impressed the Post editors without, pretty pronto, a Birmingham angle, which fortunately there is.
For 2018 is the 20th anniversary of the then National Indoor Arena not only hosting the ESC, but, as the Birmingham Mail put it in last year’s commemoration, making “Eurovision history” – before the city enjoyed a further milestone a week later in welcoming Bill Clinton and the other heads of government for their G8 Summit.
Back at the ESC, though, 1998 was the first year televoting overtook national jury voting, and the first time the UK’s representative was a black singer, Imaani Saleem, an embarrassing 32 years after the Netherlands’ Milly Scott.
Even more significantly, for an event priding itself on its promotion of diversity and “cultural understanding”, it was the first time an openly transgender singer not only performed, but actually won.
Sharon Cohen, an Israeli pop singer (unlike Australia, Israel’s at least an EBU member), had come out as transgender at 13, had sex reassignment surgery at 21, changed her first name from Yaron, and shortly afterwards her stage name to Dana International after her first album.
Famous before Birmingham, she was even more so immediately afterwards, as her winning song Diva became an international hit and a religious debate erupted about whether and how she might be permitted to pray in a synagogue.
Topping which there was the ultimate suspenseful climax, as the last country, Macedonia, announced its points allocations in ascending order.
Eight to Israel, ending Imaani’s UK hopes, but leaving Israel and Malta neck and neck. Until it awarded its 12 points not to Malta, as expected, but to its Balkan near-neighbour, Croatia, thereby handing victory to Dana International.
And, of course, setting off another round of arguments about voting blocs and prejudices.
Truly, there’s a small library of political research literature about this stuff, showing, for instance, that only about a quarter of votes are cast ‘sincerely’, for one’s genuinely preferred song, rather than, say, for a song or singer judged likelier to win.
There are also apparently quite as many voting blocs as Sir Terry Wogan liked to shake his commentator’s stick at – Eastern, Nordic, Balkan, Eastern Mediterranean, Western, former Soviet states, former Yugoslav states – though all, naturally, with exceptions.
Oh yes, and that, with almost half of all winning songs sung in English, language is also important. Now, don’t tell me you’d have known that without serious academic research. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham