Tom Dunne: Ukraine will win Eurovision, but Brits making the right moves
Kalush Orchestra from Ukraine are hot favourites for this year's Eurovision. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)
This time last year, in an article for this newspaper which I hope is now seen as visionary, I shared some thoughts on Eurovision. Recommendations for, I hoped, a brighter, happier future for all of us. Or at least a way out of the group stages. Well, what can I say? I feel “seen.” Or is it “heard?” One of them, anyway.
Sadly, my fervent dream remains unactioned. This was that anyone who has previously won Eurovision - Johnny, Linda, or Paul for example - and anyone who has ever been invited to discuss it more than three times on the Late Late Show – Johnny, Linda or Paul, for example - be invited on a little trip.
This trip, an annual event running from April onwards, would be a dramatic re-enactment of Shackleton’s ‘ill fated’ trip to the Arctic on the Endurance in 1915. Imagine the excitement of nightly updates on their adventures in South Georgia as they try to build boats and escape. Sadly this will not now be going ahead.
However, item 5 in my, em, manifesto: “Open the competition up to the TikTok generation and let them off,” does appear to have been incorporated, although more so in the UK than here.
Their entrant, Sam Ryder, is a bona fide TikTok star. He emerged during lockdown posting covers to TikTok and was soon the most followed UK artist on the platform. Sia and Elton John were soon raving. Parlophone signed him. He is, in a word, “happening.”
He cuts a more European figure than a British one. He has busked all over Europe and was once in a metal band. He is vegan and surfs. In interviews, you expect him to be representing Holland or Luxembourg.
He is a wise choice. Whilst our experiences have been bad – younger Irish fans regard Dustin and Jedward’s entries as the ‘good old days,’– the UK’s have been much worse. Bottom placed for two years running, last year not one jury, not one, gave them as much as a point. But this year, with Mr TikTok, they are 4th favourite.
But he will not win. This year, Ukraine will win by a landslide. A song written about the singer’s ageing mother and sung by a man who owns a few Jamiroquai records is being adopted by Europe as a song about the country itself. Ukraine will sweep to victory on a wave of anti-war emotion, and rightly so.
It is not hard to imagine that Eurovision and all that goes with it, represents an awful lot of what Putin hates about the West. It is often seen as a safe place for people to express their individuality, their sexuality, their flamboyance, their freedom. We see the colours of the rainbow, I shudder to think what he sees.
Eurovision irked the old Soviet Union. Its idea to bring Europe together through music did not sit well, so much so that the Eastern bloc countries started to hold their own joyless, drab equivalent. The Intervision Song Contest started in 1961, weeks after the construction of the Berlin Wall.
It is worth googling. At this remove, it looks like the work of comedy writer Armando Iannucci, but it is for real. It was started by the Jewish piano player whose life story inspired The Pianist. It was corrupt and shambolic, one entrant sang for 45 minutes, uninterrupted.
It ended when the Solidarity movement brought “common sense” back into vogue. Weirdly its return was suggested in 2009 by a certain Russian PM called, yes, you’ve guessed it. It was to include Russia, China and some other Asian countries and it was hoped it would serve as a riposte to the “moral decay of the West”.
Which makes this year’s competition all the more surreal. That one member of the Ukraine entry cannot take part because he is serving in the defence of Kyiv and that its singer is attached to a volunteer group helping refugees makes the usual Eurovision escapism utterly impossible.
When Ukraine win the contest, as they must, it means that next year the biggest celebration of freedom in all its many colours will be held in Kyiv, the city Putin wanted to destroy. I imagine he will not like that. Excellent.
