Living in La La La land
CAN I interest you in a little Eurovision appetitewhetter? Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.Was that a resounding: “Yes Mike, of course you can! I can think of no finer way to spend my Friday evening, other than maybe whacking myself around the head with a splintered chair leg…”?
Well, splendid. I’m so pleased you’ve said that.
You see, to get us in the mood for tomorrow night’s final in Turin, the people at Channel 5 have freed up a whole hour of their primetime schedule this evening to accommodate EUROVISION: SECRETS AND SCANDALS (8pm) – yes, head-to-head with Corrie and Gardeners’World – and I’d hate for them to rue such a bold decision.
It makes a refreshing change too, this show, because it doesn’t just bang on aboutWaterloo and Making Your Mind Up and Love Shining Some Kind Of Light Or Other, although admittedly it does do some of that as well. Its main purpose instead is to wryly reflect on the controversies and rum goings-on that have been linked with the contest over the decades, from shady political shenanigans to the year it helped spark a full-scale revolution (Portugal, 1974, before you ask).
Rather appropriately, the programme kicks off by recalling a year when the UK Eurovision entry lost and when politics was held to blame, only this was in an era when that was still the shocking exception rather than the wearisome rule.
The year in question was 1968, when the contest was being held at the Royal Albert Hall (the UK having won it inVienna the year before with Sandie Shaw’s Puppet On A String) and our hot favourite Cliff Richard, singing his chirpy little number Congratulations and very much wanting the world to know he was as happy as can be, had victory cruelly snatched away from him by Spain’s General Franco, allegedly.
Our Cliff being robbed by fascists sounds like something Rik Mayall from The Young Ones would have written one of his poems about, but some have claimed the Spanish dictator really did bribe the judges that year, enabling his own nation’s contribution, a song entitled La La La, to pip him to the title by one point.
Like many of the rumours recalled on this show, we’ll never know for sure, of course.
But to me it sounds plausible enough.
Even an impartial observer would have to acknowledge the obvious political message behind that Spanish entry.
“La la la la,” went its chorus. “La la la, La la la.”
See what I mean?
If that’s not blatant political sloganeering, how come it’s so uncannily close to the economic strategy proposed by Labour in their last election manifesto?