Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  The facts that emerged through deeper investigation of this event proved difficult to digest. Consequent to Turkey’s deliriously celebrated debut triumph in the 2003 Eurovision, the 2004 final had taken place in Istanbul on 14 May. In a gesture of grand, almost imperial forgiveness, state broadcaster TRT invited each of the nation’s twenty-five previous contestants, even the most perennially vilified, to a reception. It must have been a surprise when Çetin turned up, and an astonishment when he agreed to be interviewed – no one had seen him in this kind of company for years, and it was over two decades since he’d last answered a question that included the words ‘Munich’ or ‘Opera’. Who can say what coaxed him out of the house and into the studio; perhaps he felt that now Turkey had finally won the sodding thing, its journalistic representatives would at long last allow him to wipe the Euro-slate clean and move on.

  Except they wouldn’t. Faced with relentless probing into the events of 23 April 1983 and their grimly enduring legacy, Çetin eventually obliged his interviewer with a protracted mumble that veered from self-abasement to self-pity: he was sorry for what happened in Munich, for Turkey and for himself, but couldn’t understand why people still blamed him personally; it had taken him years to regain his self-control, and he sometimes felt he would suffer for this one thing for the rest of his life.

  All four days of it.

  9 May 1987 Palais de Centenaire, Brussels Seyyal Taner and Locomotif Turkey Şarkιm Sevgi Üstüne

  PERHAPS SHAMED BY that 1983 nul-point double – the first under the present voting system – for four years juries saw that no one went home empty-handed. Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley, winner the following year, remains one of the ultimate Eurovision lyrics, and in 1985 Bobbysocks gave an ecstatic Norway its debut triumph. No one would call these years classics – Terry Wogan nominated the idiotic first as the worst in Eurovision history, and with only 56.9 per cent of the maximum votes, La Det Swinge was statistically the weakest winner to date.

  Thirteen-year-old Sandra Kim’s victory the year after made her the youngest ever winner, and brought the 1987 final to Brussels: with twenty-two acts this was the biggest Eurovision yet, which along with the ambitious laser show offered a foretaste of today’s overstaffed spectaculars.

  Another day in bed, another old Eurovision. We’re halfway through the preludial overview of the majesty of Belgium’s lace-making, sand dunes and clover-leaf motorway junctions when Birna bustles in with a stack of ironing. ‘A fine way for a grown man to spend his days,’ she mutters, and I’m hardly about to argue. But like all the others who have come to mock, she soon finds herself lured in. ‘This must be 1986 … no, ‘87,’ she announces, standing right up to the telly, flat clothes clutched to her chest. As an Icelander she’s a carrier of the virulent strain of eurovisium scandinavius, but I’m still impressed – certainly a lot more than I would have been six months ago.

  ‘How do you remember?’ I ask, rearranging my multi-pillow headrest. ‘No one’s even sung yet.’

  ‘I’ve never seen this before in my life,’ she replies briskly. ‘It’s her earrings – the compere’s enormous earrings.’

  Together we watch as the presenter in question, her extraordinary armpit-length pink gloves paying almost parodic homage to Madonna’s recent Material Girl incarnation, bursts into song – English song, doubtless on the basis that it was safer to annoy the whole country rather than just one of the nation’s Flemish- or French-speaking communities. Perhaps a variant of this garbled diplomacy is behind the popular Tim Moore range of Belgian casual wear (check out eBay.nl for some disappointingly dull examples). Perhaps another explains why our hostess for the evening has decided to call herself after the Czech resistance leader in Casablanca.

  ‘Hello, I am Victor Laszlo,’ she informs the bow-tied grandees assembled before her, and suddenly it’s too much for my wife, who drops the ironing on the bed and trots out with a slightly unhinged cackle. After she’s gone I fast-forward to the credits: no, no mistake, that’s her name. Nice earrings, Vic. This is going to be a good year.

  ‘Do you know how many of you are out there tonight?’ asks our hostess. ‘How many of you are going to meet twenty-two rising stars?’ Twenty-one, I think, or I wouldn’t be in bed watching this now, by Victor’s ensuing estimate bumping the historically cumulative audience up to 500,000,001.

  Despite the disturbing accuracy of my wife’s accessory-based carbon dating, Eurovision is always a little slow out of the fashion blocks, and waited until 1987 before planting its many-starred flag atop Mount Eighties. Four years after Limahl had done his hair-based worst, he’s paid fearsome tribute in female Norwegian form. Kojo’s backing band had gone for the Blues Brothers look only a couple of years after the film’s release, but here, a half-decade on, are two Israelis in black suits, thin ties and Ray-Bans. ‘Hupa hule hule hule,’ they sing, prancing about manically, ‘hupa hupa hule hule.’ Shir Habatlanim, translated by sundry Eurovision authorities as Lazy Bums, We Two Bums and Bum-Song, was almost martyred by a French-style, self-imposed drivel-monument boycott. ‘This is not an appropriate example of Israeli popular music,’ protested the nation’s minister of culture, to (self-evidently) deaf ears.

  Eurovision hasn’t given Belgium much to smile about. Fud Leclerc, as we know, made an unwelcome name for himself and his country as the first-ever nul-pointer; no nation has finished last more often (OK – no nation except Norway), and Sandra Kim’s 1986 victory remains their sole triumph in forty-nine attempts. To celebrate it, they entered a singer recently betrothed to the bereaved husband of a previous Belgian competitor who had died from cancer in 1984. Hooray!

  Sweden’s Lotta Engberg is the first act of the evening to celebrate Eurovision’s oddly enduring fascination with the colour yellow. One of the Italians who follows her out raises another redoubtable conundrum: Umberto Tozzi wrote Gloria for Laura Brannigan, a song which I’ll be uploading to my replacement iPod only should its disk capacity exceed 90 billion gigabytes, but which nonetheless stands head and shoulder-pads above the insipid ballad he and his mate Raf offer us here. What’s happened to Eurovision songwriting? Without wanting to sound both dull and mad – but probably failing – where are the inheritors to Puppet on a String, Waterloo, Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son … even Making Your Mind Up? It’s a question that recurs to me later when Plastic Bertrand – how could I have forgotten? – strides on to the stage and grinningly lisps his way through a shockingly bland disco bopper. Viktor might have been over-egging her countryman’s pop-punk 1978 hit Ça Plane Pour Moi in declaring it ‘astounding’, but after three minutes of utterly forgettable Euro-pap (and compellingly memorable camp prancing) I find myself in almost tearful, rose-tinted agreement. Naturally enough, this stalwart of the ‘Name Ten Famous Belgians’ parlour game is tonight flying the flag for Luxembourg.

  Spain’s Patricia Kraus comes out with Diana hair and Aladdin Sane make-up – no Patricia, not the stool! But it’s too late – only ten points from Greece saves her from a fate that eighteen years later would have brought a slightly diffident Englishman and his unreliable voice recorder to her doorstep. Then she takes her bow, Victor shows us the gap in her front teeth and announces, ‘An actress and singer, Seyyal Taner was born a star …’

  That she was, and nul points or no, she’ll die one too. One hapless Turkish journalist kicked off a recent interview by asking Seyyal Taner for her place of birth. The retort was as haughty as it was magnificent: ‘Is there anybody who does not know?’

  Tracking Seyyal down, and setting our meeting up, had proven consistently entertaining. I’d grabbed the first toothsome leads from Turkey’s well-developed and rewardingly multi-lingual Eurovision community, buoyant after their nation’s debut victory in the 2003 contest.

  ‘Wow! Seyyal Taner was the only one with a personal light among those Doris Day types,’ began one reply to my mass-mailed cry for help, concluding with the irresistible judgement that ‘she was the best bad girl of the day!’

  ‘She is
a popular and successful singer,’ wrote a more circumspect correspondent, ‘and null points she got did not change this fact. Now she is a respected middle-aged lady.’ A fuller biography advised me that she ‘got sad for two years after her big fat 0, released three albums, moved to beach-town Bodrum, since did nothing, now suddenly she appear in a big soap opera we call Istanbul is my Witness’. Almost as an afterthought, this correspondent rounded off his reminiscences with Seyyal’s mobile number: that afternoon began a brief but memorable series of telephonic exchanges with my first female nul-pointer.

  Her call-answering salutation had been a huskily prolonged drawl of ‘Seyyyyyal’; the words that follow this shortly after brusquely interrupt the mumbled explanatory introduction that in the pre-Kalvik era had been my quest’s most dreaded component. ‘I am in Istanbul traffic. It’s crazy, you know. You can call Friday. Welcome-bye-bye.’ So imperious was her tone – the perfect accompaniment to the almost aggressively sultry demeanour apparent from her publicity portfolio – that I listened to the line go dead with nothing more than meek resignation. I imagined Seyyal forcing her cabriolet through a logjam of knackered taxis with a volley of impatient expletives, huge shades propped on head, long scarf, cigarette holder. She sounded glamorous, a little louche and astonishingly self-confident. In short, she sounded famous.

  I called her on Friday; she was at home. ‘This is some job you have,’ she teased mischievously after I’d explained myself, ‘to travel all over meeting the zero people. Why don’t you speak with Ahmed, the composer?’ As she gave me his number I heard the now familiar sound of bucks being shifted: Eurovision judged songs, I was once more being indirectly reminded, not singers. I felt for her as I’d felt for the other nul-pointers, but it’s a sad reality of human nature that the messenger always gets shot. If I reversed my Mondeo off a bridge, would anyone care how Ford took the news?

  The next time I called, a timid, ancient factotum answered her phone. ‘Seyyal Taner no Istanbul,’ he eventually croaked. The time after that, she cut me short with a dramatic suggestion. ‘I have a plan. You come to Istanbul next month, and then we go to bedroom together – is maybe more fun to talk there.’ Maybe, I stuttered, realising just before the now traditional ‘welcome-bye-bye’ that she’d actually been inviting me to her maritime residence in Bodrum.

  In the end, we didn’t go to Bodrum together. Off-season there were no direct flights from Britain, and only one connection a day from Istanbul. If you were Seyyal Taner the latter logistical situation evidently wasn’t a problem, but Turkish Airlines couldn’t offer me a seat between the two cities for long weeks. ‘It’s OK,’ yawned Seyyal when I passed this on. ‘I meet you in Istanbul. We meet, we eat, we talk. Welcome-bye-bye.’

  My taxi driver had heard of Seyyal Taner, but slaloming madly through the evening rush hour away from the airport, it was difficult to take our conversation beyond the non-committal nod her name elicited. Here I was in Europe, and I couldn’t even say please or thank you, yes or no. With a nervous inward titter, I recalled the tribulations of Welsh striker Dean Saunders after a transfer to Istanbul’s top club Galatasaray in the twilight of his career. Introducing his newly christened infant son Callum to the press, he was met with deafening roars of laughter: ‘Mr Saunders,’ spluttered a hack, wiping his eyes, ‘you have called your boy Pencil.’

  The closest I’d previously been to Turkey was while surveying its Eurovision-blighting Cypriot republic through a pair of holiday binoculars. This was a country twice the size of Germany, more populous than France, yet to me it remained an impenetrable enigma. With green eyes and blond hair, a surprising proportion of pedestrians we passed didn’t look even slightly Turkish; the Arabic script I’d ignorantly imagined hampering my movements would be encountered only on the cover of a pirated Aladdin DVD.

  Old men at a bus stop nasally relieving themselves in the gutter, minarets soaring from crumbling, corrugated slums, fearsome rust-streaked cargo hulks looming up out of the Marmara Sea. After a stopover in Zurich, it was like coming down with the cultural equivalent of the bends: I could only hope, for his sake, that I hadn’t been followed here by the twitching obsessive-compulsive who a couple of hours earlier had loudly dry-retched watching me refill my water-bottle from an airport wash-basin. Following all those visits to the nul-pointers’ moneyed, technocratic heartlands, and one to their Norwegian beachside consulate, here I was in Eurovision’s wild east.

  My homework had exposed the yawning socio-economic chasm that divided Turkey from the Brussels-based union its leaders were so desperate to join. Turkish men die younger than any other in Europe outside what we might tactfully call the continent’s vodka belt, and only three-quarters of their women can read. Per capita GDP is half Portugal’s, and hyperinflation that hit 85 per cent in the late nineties endowed the banknotes in my pocket with more zeroes than a Eurovision reunion in Oslo.

  But the closer we got to the centre, this harsh, stark picture blurred: huge plasma screens were hung up in squares, a mobile-phone advert filled one entire flank of an eight-storey office block. Istanbul was clearly going to be a City-of-Contrasts job. The commercial vigour was certainly compelling. We drove up a teeming boulevard lined almost exclusively with guitar retailers, then turned through the arches of a vast Roman aqueduct into another whose pavements were filled with gleaming ranks of new bicycles. My driver seemed at home in these streets. ‘Shopping, very good,’ he rasped, showing me his mummy-of-Rameses teeth in the rear-view mirror. A fast-food stall being wheeled out into the road gave them another outing. ‘Turkish key-bap, very good.’ I was looking forward to both, and told him so.

  ‘Hotel, very good,’ he announced soon after, although surveying the dusty edifice we’d pulled up in front of all I could coax out was a feeble hum. In a moment of disoriented weakness after our shopping/kebab bonding moment I had entrusted the driver to select my home for the night, and the wink he exchanged with the stubbled, smoking lord of the lobby emphasised what a shamingly inept piece of tourism this had been.

  ‘Is new room for you,’ said the receptionist as we creaked up the dark and ancient stairs. ‘You pay sixty dollar, please?’ We were outside the door now; a powerful, complex odour seeped out from the three-inch gap at its foot.

  ‘Can I, um, see inside first?’ The corridor light, activated by a ten-second timer switch, clicked off.

  ‘Sixty dollar,’ said the darkness.

  Well, it was only one night. ‘Fine,’ I replied; the light clicked on, the door creaked ajar and a moment later I was alone inside.

  Two walls were hospital-white, one pub-ceiling yellow, the last a piebald blend of both; atop the lopsided wardrobe sat the lidless drum of emulsion required to finish the job. The lightly paint-speckled bed was of military aspect and cub-scout dimensions; the lavatory pan was home to three rusty nails and a frothy topping of decorator’s relief. Even fully open the window had failed to clear the stench of economy brilliant white, nor that of its applicator’s armpits. I peered out, striping a misplaced sleeve, and beheld a scene of decayed devastation, two blocks of half-demolished, half-abandoned shops and garages releasing thin spirals of orange dust into the evening sun. Beyond, Istanbul yawned away into hazy, ochred infinity, a mid-rise mess occasionally pierced by minarets and pylons. I was reminded of the first time my son played Sim City, and blew his entire civic maintenance budget on coal-fired power stations. Looking out there, and indeed in here, surveying the all-encompassing non-Oslo, un-Helsinki-ness of my surroundings, I grasped just how much Eurovision must mean to its Turkish hopefuls.

  Their 1987 representative phoned my mobile as I was on my way out a second time, having popped over to the shops for a bottle of water a moment earlier (forget human rights and that wayward economy: the day a tourist willingly lowers his head to a Turkish tap is the day they’ll have EU membership in the bag). I loitered by the reception desk as we firmed up our meeting plans; she seemed far less haughtily distant now that I was actually here.

 
‘You have a nice hotel there?’ It was central, I told her after a small pause. ‘But you must ask me! I know all top-quality hotels!’ The receptionist had been raising his eyebrows in a beckoning manner, and as I wandered towards the doors his entreaties became vocal.

  ‘Just a minute,’ I told Seyyal, lowering the phone from my ear and walking up to the desk.

  ‘You lock room?’ asked its proprietor, his high voice urgent. ‘Last time I think no.’

  The many concerns unleashed by this statement were at least shared. ‘Who is that?’ barked Seyyal, who had overheard it all. ‘What is that hotel? Let me speak with this man!’ Her outrage, and its concomitant concern, was touching. She was still at it two minutes later, as I re-emerged from my room, pockets abulge with the few remaining items of conceivable value I’d left there. ‘I must speak with manager!’ she boomed, imperiously.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ I murmured, clomping back down the dark, unsteady staircase. And it was. In the course of my travels to date, I’d become lazy and a little spoiled, had it all too easy. Just ask the customs chaps at Oslo airport – I’d been the threat to their nation, not vice versa.

  ‘Be careful,’ cautioned the receptionist, now rather superfluously, as I walked past him towards the hotel exit, Istanbul’s late-afternoon, late-winter sun betraying a coat of sandy dust that sheathed the glass doors. ‘So many hungry people.’

  With my excitement and curiosity now tempered by advanced paranoia, I walked the short distance to Taksim, the traffic ensnared square that was home to the sort of glitzy hotels Seyyal would no doubt have booked for me. No matter how un-Turkish some of the emerald-eyed daredevils jogging through the maze of log-jammed taxis might look, I looked a lot less. In a bid to win Seyyal over, I’d gone for a period hipster look that teamed a purple paisley shirt with a black velvet suit, a conspicuous wardrobe that my fellow pedestrians were appraising with the frank insolence it merited. ‘Can I help you, my friend?’ hissed a voice in my ear as I squinted at a street sign; without turning to encounter its owner I strode shakily away, my fear-ometer now cranked up past street crime to white-slave trade.