Tom Dunne: My Lovely Horse and the relief Father Ted will bring to Eurovision night
The Father Ted episode with the Eurovision reference will be screened instead of this year's song contest on Saturday night.
RTÉ’s decision to screen the Eurovision episode in place of the actual Eurovision couldn’t have come at a better time. The grimness of the world has become inescapable, and when one of the previous great escapes no longer even feels like that, then “who you gonna call”? Ted, Dougal and Jack, obviously.
Regular readers of this column probably already know that I have a soft spot for Eurovision. I grew up in our golden age. Winning Eurovision was something we were good at when we weren’t good at much else. Before we could row, swim, kick a ball or box we could win Eurovision.
The people who won it for us were legends. You’d meet them out; Johnny, Niamh, Paul. “How ’ya Johnny?” you might say casually to the Logan fellah in Lillies or the Pink Elephant as if it was nothing. But as soon as he walked past you’d fall to your knees and scream “Johnny Logan’s after saying ‘hello’ to me!”
You might pass out then and need to be revived with smelling salts. But no one judged you. Johnny et al weren’t like normal people. They had been to the mountain and had been anointed with the words, “Ireland… douze points.” They were gods.
Once, Niamh let me try on the jacket she was wearing when she won in 1993. It was a moment that will live with me forever. I had once met Pele. It was me, Pele and Tony Fenton in a photo. My wife asked me: “Who is that beside Tony?” Wearing the sacred jacket trumps even that.
The things that annoyed most people about Eurovision were the things I liked: The inanity of the songs, the OTT performers, the smell of desperation, the bad singing, the false happiness, the outfits, the bizarre routines and the national spokesperson at the voting stage who had 30 seconds to establish a presenting career in their own country.
I loved all of these things, but mostly, I loved us winning time after time after time. Read ‘em and weep: 1992, ’93, ’94, ’96. It sounds vaguely like a Simple Minds song, and it was. “Burning bridge and ecstasy, crashing beats and fantasy,” sang Jim Kerr. And if that wasn’t Millstreet in 1993 what was?
When my children got into it, I felt my work as a dad was done. I should have capitalised on this and released a parenting book. It Takes the Eurovision Song Contest to Raise a Child would have sold, I’m sure of it. A signing tour through the Eurovision capitals — Stockholm, Malmo, Vienna — would have been swamped.
It all hinged on printing out the voting forms. Then as the show progressed you huddled around the TV and gave each act marks out of 10. It was great fun, but the children also learned valuable lessons about diversity, inclusion, gay rights, block voting, geography and the unpredictability of the public vote.
We loved it to the extent that sometimes the children would make playlists of all the songs. Then sometimes months later, on say a drive to Clifden, a four-hour drive, we’d be the only family in the world singing Australia’s truly dreadful 2022 entry at the top of our voices.
It will be different this year, but that is not to say it won’t be fun too. The Song for Europe episode of is perfect for lots of reasons. It’s almost exactly 30 years since it aired (April 5, 1996). So much has changed since then, and Ted and his ilk was quite central to a lot of that change.
Incredibly its arrival on TV coincided with the very last time we won the contest, in Oslo, 1996, with Eimear Quinn and . You can’t help but wonder did it mark a kind of changing of the guard? Could a Eurovision Ireland, with Dana and Niamh and Johnny, really co-exist with a new razor sharp, self-aware Ireland that saw a lot of things — including the Catholic Church — for what they really were?
The big question now is ‘Are we cursed?’ Are we, like Mayo GAA, destined never to taste triumph again? If we are, many will point to Dustin and his 2008 entry as the seed of our unhappiness. I think it may have had a lot more to do with Craggy Island.
Do you think the gods of Eurovision can forgive Dougal’s: “It’s Eurovision, Ted, mad fellahs jumping around in silver paper!”?
