Where, any sensible European, or actually any other thinking person might ask is Azerbaijan? Is it anywhere in Europe? Well actually it isn’t. According to the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World it borders the Caspian Sea in south-west Asia. One of those former Soviet Republics whose leader sat on Gorbachev’s politburo representing an oil rich patch of crap so when the USSR packed up it was kind of left to him! Great! A whole republic all yours and after he died it naturally went to his son! Elections? People voting? Don’t be ridiculous. In best dynastic style he inherited it. Got it for nothing! Little knife head looking guy with a sharp moustache, suave dolly looking wife who doesn’t know how to put on her lipstick, two regal style daughters and a millionaire teenage son. This is The Family, as they are called, who run the country and gave orders for their police and heavies to bulldoze the flats and houses of hundreds of poor people so they could build a Crystal Stadium for the Euro-Derision Song Contest. A shameful excuse to advertise what a lovely place Azerbaijan is and put barrels of oil dosh into the pockets of the organisers.
So, the place is in Asia, like most of Russia, but that’s okay. Bulldoze houses, arrest anyone who complains let alone protests and put on a show of choreographed nationalism along with fountains and lights and call it culture. That said let’s get down to business. Why do people in Europe watch Euro-Derision when most of the lyrics and music are juvenile at best and often plain rubbish that any computer can write, the loudness of the music more often than not drowning out the words. You are lucky you can hear what’s being said but that’s not the reason why most men watch. The great majority of lead singer performances of each group are given by girls with legs so amazingly long, wearing skirts and shifts so unashamedly short that they’re half way to soft porn. For the payment of a licence fee guys can get a taste of the national flavour of some of the best gyrating good-lookers in Europe and wonder about the national character of what lies beyond those adorable thighs. And if you remember the babe from Romania, her legs went just about all the way up to her mouth, or was it yours?
In that sense the Euro-Derision Song Contest for most men, if they care to admit it, is a series of nationally flavoured erections between sips of coffee, coca cola or schnapps.
But then that’s only the girls. There are also the boys! Many handsome at best but more often pretty. But that’s all right. Plenty for dryzabone housewives to ogle at and grannies to cop off on! Don’t you realise it, all you pretty young Russian, East European and Scandinavian boys? You’re being gobbed off by grannies to say nothing of countless numbers of elderly gentlemen!
So come on you fiscally prudent and imprudent Europeans. A large number of you get off on the acts. There are tarts to please and boys to tease but that’s not the only reason why so many of you watch. It’s a spectacle for sure only it’s much more than that. Many performances take spectacle so far that they fall into the realm of the ridiculous. That said there’s the ordinary run of the mill ridiculous like Jedward, two Irish lads wearing silly silver suits who originally came to ludicrous prominence as a pure publicity creation by doing little jumps. That’s all they are, a couple of Irish boys who say silly things and do little jumps which they did in spades at Euro-Derision. The little jumps I mean! On the other hand there’s ridiculousness of an altogether different league. During the recent contest a group of toothless Russian grandmothers, or was it great grandmothers, dressed to the gills in national costume performed together as deep oldies and had people mesmerised by the sheer cheek of it.
Now either this was a superb joke, a wonderful piece of black humour cynically pulled by the Russians on Western Europe as a mainstream gas or it was for real! However Russian politicians are not particularly known for having any real sense of fun so they must have meant it and amazingly it worked. Something so deeply ridiculous, so shamelessly awful that they actually got away with it and came close to the top. So what does that say? Well I’ll tell you. People all over Europe saw it in similar fashion. The Grannies were totally different. So far out that despite their age you couldn’t help admiring the sheer gall of them and their toothless smiles. Another verdict on age though was poured all over the British entry! It’s one thing to be 76 and flabby, it’s quite another to be so vocally past it that you sound like you’re on loan from a mortuary. Was Engelbert what’s his Dink the best Britain had? Some song, some way past retirement singer who was so stupendously nothing? If that is genuinely the case then we’re facing something far more serious than an economic crisis. It’s like the cultural character of the nation is being taken over by Wet Wipes.
That’s it really for the British. A national character of Wet Wipes on the one hand or crowds of heavily tattooed men all wearing earrings heard at England football matches yelling Come on In-ger-land… In that sense it’s either Wet Wipes or In-ger-land. In a culturally easier and far more talented past it used to be the Beatles. Now it’s pseudo-romantic, geriatric wet wipes twaddle or In-ger-land shouted by tens of thousands of Staffordshire bull terrier type men. But then we don’t care we British and quite frankly why should we when we think about the Euro-Derision Song Contest and the way the people of these countries voted in the recent piece of European nationalistic awfulness? The British entry was dreadful but then were so many others. Yet in votes garnished we came second from last and those equally abominable scored large numbers of points. No-one with any brain could have missed the significance.
Consider the vote of the British. Our judgement was eclectic, neutral and generous. It went all over the place to those we thought were deserving. The same could hardly be said for the people of seventy percent or more of other countries from the nasty little shit hole republics that once formed Yugoslavia, the Nazi flavoured Baltic states some of whom give pensions to former SS killers, the ghastly national urinals of Albania, Moldova and Georgia to say nothing of Poland and the ex-Soviet republic of the Ukraine whose governments facilitate the extraordinarily offensive anti-Semitic hate demonstrations of their football fans on stadium terraces by doing nothing about them. In the vast majority of cases these ‘new’ European national political entities of the last twenty to thirty years, best described as banana republics, all gave maximum or near maximum points to their geographic neighbours and even the respectable Scandinavians were in on the act and just as bad neither the Germans, French, Spanish and Portuguese had anything to be proud of.
To put it bluntly, the sight of many of these dirty little dumps voting for each other said a great deal. Told us a lot about Europe!
The Crystal Stadium of Baku, Azerbaijan, was definitely no place of love and peace, for healing of any kind. Beneath all the tarted up cultural gloss the Euro-Derision Song Contest was not an event proudly displaying European cultural diversity but in reality a forum for national chauvinism and separateness. I saw no sense of unity or union. A delight of diversity in a collections of nations. Only a silly desperate cultural froth egged up by ambitious politicians jerking the gyrating performers behind the screens like puppets on a string.
Hello Baku! This is Ireland, Portugal and Greece… Thank you for the wonderful show you’ve put on… Now please, please Germany, give us some money!
Hello Baku! This is some government sponsored television go-go boy or girl from Moldova, Georgia, Byelorussia, Albania and Bosnia…Thank you for the lovely show you’ve given us. Everything’s just fine in our lovely country never mind all those people our lovely police beat up for protesting about all the violations of basic civil liberties and human rights.
You heard it all dear readers, didn’t you? That’s real progress! All those carefully chosen presenters saying… Hello, we’ve only recently become independent so it will take time for us to become part of the happy European ‘family’. Really? Who’s kidding who here. May I suggest you go stuff yourselves, you and your gang of vile little dictators!
Right, so who wins our Special Award for sheer unmitigated awfulness? We’ll have a poll. Only the British voting because we’ve got the most seriously cynical humour in Europe. We’ll call it the Crystal Sphincter. A small geode full of crystals that’s shaped like an arsehole mounted on a gold stand with the name of the winning group engraved on it. Awarded once a year right after Euro-Derision. And we’ll need a celebrity to make the presentation. A real special person and nobody better for the job than Nick Clegg! Okay, think about it. Why is he so perfect for handing out such a great honour?
So which of the acts you saw do you think should be candidates for the prize, and please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten them already! Right, just send me your selection of what you remember for its sheer awfulness marked 1,2 and 3 and we’ll see what happens. Yes, send your selection to the Comments Page
on my posting site. Will it be the Russian Grannies… the Albanian Rope Hair Women… the Jumping Irish Boys… or Englebert Geriatric-Dink?
And finally, do you realise that if I asked the same question to people all over Europe suggesting they take part in such a poll they wouldn’t, quite frankly, know what I was talking about. It’s called having no sense of humour. They’re too up their own arses to see the funny side, and as plain awful as so many aspects of British society are, like having such a rotten and deeply offensive criminal justice system and living in a country that’s still semi-feudal, where people only have the legal status of being SUBJECTS of a monarch, that is furthermore not far from being a police state, we still have the main saving grace of being able to see that so much of life is ridiculous. We can still somehow grasp the sheer awfulness of situations and make our own judgments because we all share a precious, powerfully anarchic British sense of freedom.
Despite our current economic situation, the sheer vile character of politicians of the main political parties, most of whom have been on a thieving spree for donkey’s years and the too often threatening and offensive demeanour of our police, we can still laugh at it all. It’s not a happy laughter born of mirth, more a grim sickly laughter. A mischievous chuckle and sometimes even a damn good belly laugh.
We can’t laugh openly at rude or offensive policemen or we might be arrested for something or other and that’s nothing to laugh at. Not being able to laugh anymore just because we couldn’t help laughing at someone’s conduct! So in effect our social ability to laugh is constrained and what kind of freedom is that? Not being able to laugh out loud? More often than not then our sense of humour, our laughter, is confined to within ourselves. Thus the great opportunity provided by the Euro-Derision Song Contest. We can laugh harmlessly out loud and therefore the Contest is liberating. A force for freeing our anarchic emotions. Letting them out on the loose without fear of reprisal.
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