Tom Dunne: I'm really not sure about outsourcing our Eurovision entry to Norway
Emmy performing ‘Laika Party’ on The Late Late Eurosong special. Picture: Andres Poveda
No way to sugar coat it: We’ve outsourced our Eurovision entry to Norway. Come the semi-final on May 15 I see only confusion. Have Norway now got two horses in this race? Will this split the Scandi vote? Have we really outsourced the song to a country that came last 12 times?
If we win, is it really a win for them? Who claims it? Would 'Laika Party' be our eighth win, at last? OR would Sweden, our bitter Eurovision rivals, just say, “Sorry lads you’re technically still on seven wins and Norway have won it for you once?” Would there be a tribunal?
Or is it a kind of surrogacy? Have we asked Norway to carry our Euro hopes for us and have we thought that through? What if they win but upon seeing the victory with its little smile and adorable charms suddenly say, “Noooooo! I want to keep it!”
Will we then have to run on stage and wrestle the performers to the ground and demand they stick to the deal? “Give us what is ours” we will sob into the cameras, as our friends in Europe hold their heads in shame. Is that our Euro future?
And where will it lead? Can Niamh Kavanagh now represent Estonia? Will Cyprus at last fulfil their long-cherished dream of seeing Johnny Logan tog out in the white, yellow and green and sing ‘Limassol You’re a Lady’.
There is precedent — someone else doing the heavy lifting for you — but it is wafer thin and politically charged.
Celine Dion is indeed French but represented Switzerland, the world’s most neutral country. A country with a long tradition of taking other country’s deposits, no questions asked, or their very wealthy tax exiles. You could argue it’s more a tax concept than an actual state.
And the Katrina and the Waves win for the UK? She was American. That’s a pub quiz now: “How did America once win the Eurovision Song Contest?” ask savvy quiz masters. Still, at least they aren’t Luxembourg.
Luxembourg have won it five times. Four of those winners were French, the first name of one winner was France, the second name of another was Hermès. I presume they wore berets and carried garlic. The odd woman out was Vicky Leandros who, you might guess, is as Greek as natural yogurt.
This leaves them with five wins, the most per capita of any country. It’s one win for every 134,000 Luxembourgers. Except of course no actual Luxembourger has ever won it at all.
Our entry this year was written at a song writing camp in Norway where the aim was to produce Eurovision type songs. Emmy Guttulsrud and her brother Erland were in attendance with other song writers Hendrik Østlund and Truls Marias Aarra. It was here they met Kilbeggan-based song writer Larissa Tormey. Therein lies our tenuous skin in this game.
Which brings us to the second part of our problem. The hero of the song is Laika, a mongrel who in 1957 discovered that the nice people who plucked her from the streets of Moscow were not bringing her to a luxury kennels after all.
When they said “We’re gonna make you a star”, they really, literally, meant it.
Yes she is that Laika: as in “Laika, the first dog in space.” She went into history books in Sputnik II, the second ever spacecraft launched into an earth orbit. She did not come back in it. Viewer discretion, discrete veils, look away now.
This makes her an actual dog martyr, which is something we might be able to work with. We have a tradition of martyr songs in Ireland. This might actually work. The only problem is if we/they/Norway/whatever win: then Laika will become the most famous dog in, ahem, Irish history.
I don’t know where this leaves Bran and Sceólang, Fionn MacCumhaill’s famed hunting dogs, neé nephews turned into beasts, but I suspect it is looking down the barrel of a P45. The glamour of space trumps mythology every time.
Think of my little family on May 15. I have laboriously trained them to sit opposite the TV with voting forms printed out in colour and little pens in hand. The voting forms come with little national flags on them. This year, will there be two Norwegian ones?
A dark day for the parish, as we’d say. Or “Ah gutter”, “dritt,” and possibly even a “for faen skyld” as they’d say in Norway.
