Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  Five months after the first Eurovision Song Contest, the Suez crisis had offered the humiliating evidence that Britain could no longer consider itself a geo-political superpower; the hard lesson of Eurovision 2003 bestowed the same fate on our delusions of pop supremacy. Back in Liverpool, Sir Paul and his academy chums would soon be contemplating a grim symmetry: the feted birthplace of world-conquering British pop had now doubled as its tawdry mausoleum.

  The soul-searching, though, had not yet begun in earnest: as a hungover Chris discovered at the Riga airport newsstands the following afternoon, the British press generally prefer to shoot first, and ask questions later. ‘He kept reading out this terrible personal stuff,’ says Gemma, ‘and I kept begging him to stop.’ But he didn’t, until she was reduced to tears by a review that included the phrase ‘a voice that could curdle cream’.

  ‘I’ve kept everything,’ says Chris, with the grudge-hoarding obsessiveness peculiar to his civic brethren, ‘even the worst of it.’ Of which there was plenty. Jemini were ‘nul-points pop flops’; Cry Baby was routinely preceded with the likes of ‘Euro-disaster’ and even, less than a week on, ‘the now notorious’. Girls Aloud manager and future X-Factor judge Louis Walsh called the performance ‘a disgrace, the worst I’ve ever heard. It was like somebody went into Boots, found the first person they saw behind the counter and asked them if they could sing. They said no, but they were picked anyway.’ The Guardian summarised Cry Baby as ‘bloody awful’, and even nice Cheryl Baker, who’d been there along with the rest of Bucks Fizz to congratulate Jemini after their qualifying triumph, called their entry ‘a bad Eurovision song’, whilst tactfully attributing Gemma’s wayward vocals to ‘nerves on the night’. There was none of that traditionally British sympathy for the underdog – after half a century as Eurovision’s overdogs, we just couldn’t find it in ourselves.

  Doorstepped outside his Liverpool home, Martin Isherwood backed the line being energetically disseminated by Terry Wogan, who was now openly attributing the result to ‘post-Iraq backlash’. ‘The song was great and the performance was fantastic,’ Isherwood stoutly maintained, inciting one paper to introduce him as ‘the man responsible for the worst British entry in forty-eight years’. ‘But politically we’re out on a limb at the moment, and as a country I think we paid the price last night.’

  Abroad, the gloating was widespread: this was Wogan-payback time. Germany’s Bild talked of ‘sulking in the home of pop’, and Austrian paper Der Standard poured scorn on the ‘casualty of war theories’; ‘Poms caned in Eurovision,’ ran one predictable Australian headline. Most damning of all, despite or perhaps because of its reluctant, conciliatory tone, was the testimony of a J. Teigen from Oslo: ‘I know I’m in no position to say it, and it makes me a little sad, but they were a bit out of tune.’

  Already dumped by their management – Martin O’Shea somehow convinced the press an extended stay in Riga was necessary to pursue his investigations into sabotage and vandalism – Jemini arrived alone back at Manchester airport, enjoyed a quick embrace with their families and were promptly whisked away to a pre-arranged gig in a Birmingham pub. ‘Then it was off to London for days of interviews on TV and radio – madness, absolute madness,’ says Gemma. It’s hard to square the nonchalance of her tone with the task in hand: facing down the media vultures alone, without moral or professional support. ‘We had each other. And we just really wanted our say, because the press had had theirs. You couldn’t shut us up.’

  Peddling their say – Iraq war with a sound-monitor garnish – helped fill in the growing gaps between gigs. Those they did play, though, were apparently well attended and good natured. ‘People came because they wanted to see if we were crap, if we could sing,’ smiles Gemma, ‘and when they found out that we weren’t, and we could, everyone came up and shook our hands.’

  ‘We needed to prove that we went to Eurovision for a reason, that the public voted us to go there,’ says Chris, doughtily. ‘That we were … good.’

  A pair of twenty-one year olds, abruptly yanked aboard the celebrity merry-go-round and viciously booted off: one can only stand and applaud the unblinking, defiant chutzpah with which Jemini got up and dusted themselves down. There were occasional Kalvik-lite confrontations – cheeky cries of ‘nul points!’ rang out as Chris walked into a local film preview – but the pair’s very public resilience disarmed bullies in the press and on the streets. ‘You’d see groups of lads point and stare, and you’d think, Oh aye, here we go,’ says Chris. ‘Then they’d come up, all polite, and ask for a photo.’ After internal deliberation I decide not to share with Chris the following quotation from gay-culture monthly Attitude: ‘I have spent many a Saturday night following Jemini’s Chris Cromby around Liverpool’s bars, pinching myself that I am within spunking distance of a living, breathing ESC entrant.’

  And there was a moment, a few dizzying days, when the phoenix poked its beak tantalisingly from the smouldering Riga ashes. Cry Baby had been released on the day of the final, and when the singles chart came out on 7 June, there it was at number fifteen. The day after, when Chris’s mates from Atomic Kitten phoned to tell him ‘to keep taking it on the chin’, he was able to idly mention that Jemini had just leapfrogged their latest release.

  Gemma and Chris waited for an excited management to summon them back to the studio; their half-finished album was still nominally scheduled for an autumn release (‘We’re thinking of calling it Nul Points,’ confided Chris to one interviewer). But the call didn’t come, and their absence from the following week’s chart meant it never would.

  There were still engagements of sorts: in the middle of June a wealthy businessman flew them to Geneva to play at his son’s eighteenth birthday party. (‘That was the first time I ever saw a bottle of proper champagne,’ sighs Chris, who walked out of the event with a purloined litre of vodka ‘shoved down the back of my pants’.) But by the end of the summer, the gigs had dried to a trickle of Euro-camp charity events in gay pubs and transvestite revue bars; the last on-stage sighting of Jemini was at the 2003 Halloween Spooktacular in New Brighton.

  What little they’d earnt from Cry Baby’s sales was locked up in a still-unresolved dispute with their former management, and to squeeze the last pennies from the compromised Jemini brand, the pair were obliged to endure modestly rewarded TV humiliation: in a kids’-telly gunge tank, or as the butt of a Harry Hill joke. Sometimes things went too far. When an unkind TV journalist invited Chris to comment on the clearly groundless rumour that Jemini would be supplying backing vocals at the next Song for Europe, he snapped back, ‘If we won an Oscar, we’d still just be “those guys who scored nul points”.’

  So didn’t they turn anything down? ‘If you can laugh at yourself it helps, and we laugh at ourselves more than anyone,’ says Gemma, doing just that, almost recklessly. ‘We usually took whatever we were offered.’ There was no one to tell them not to until Alan turned up.

  In the aftermath of Riga, a Scottish psychologist advised Jemini in print to ‘get out there with smiles on their faces’: with predictable reference to Eddie the Eagle, he said that if the pair portrayed themselves as plucky losers who didn’t take things too seriously, ‘the record-buying public would respond to them’. But though pity might earn you a pat on the back or a pint at the bar, successfully milking it for much more is a tall order outside the domain of charity. The British reward only those underdogs prepared to get up on their hind legs and dance: if Jemini were going to coax a few last quid out of their humiliation, they’d have to relive it. Don’t tell me that what people want to see on Eddie the Eagle’s face is a smile. It’s bloodied slush and half a pair of bottle-bottom specs.

  By Christmas, they weren’t even being asked to prostitute their dignity. ‘For six months we’d been trying and trying and trying to get Jemini going,’ Gemma sighs, ‘and that’s when you have to say: well, maybe not now, maybe there’ll be another time.’ The last of the three entries in jeminionline.com’s guest-book (‘We wu
z robbed! Woooo!’) is dated November 2003; by the start of 2004 Gemma was manning the reception desk at a Mercedes showroom, with Chris a menswear sales assistant at a store in the city centre.

  But as Finn Kalvik has found out, a monumental Eurovision disaster tends to linger on the cultural horizon. ‘Just this month there’s a guy come up to me in the shop,’ says Chris, ‘and he says, “You don’t half remind me of that bloke from Jemini.” When I told him I was he almost dropped on the floor, and I said, “Well, you know, we’ve all got to pay the bills.”’ Gemma resigned from the showroom after a customer recognised her, thus inducing colleagues into a light-hearted but quickly unbearable campaign of themed banter; the dyed hair is intended to forestall any similar unpleasantness blighting her current job, selling membership subscriptions at a Manchester health and fitness club.

  I later learn of Gemma’s Porsche-driving new boyfriend, which may explain her comparative lack of enthusiasm for whatever pickings remain to be scavenged from the tomb of Jemini (notwithstanding the £100 of mine she’ll shortly be trousering). Twice Chris taps his nose and mentions ‘something we’re doing together in September’, but Gemma’s nod lacks conviction and enthusiasm, and when I ask if it’s a comeback she responds with a hollow laugh: whatever it is or was, by November nothing’s happened that I’ve noticed.

  Though he dwells with touching sincerity on their personal and professional relationship, one senses that Chris – self-evidently the more fame-driven of the pair, and the one who emerged from Riga with his vocal reputation intact – would happily go it alone. The modest limit of Gemma’s current ambition is ‘maybe a bit of musical theatre’. (‘How can you make a comeback,’ she says, ‘when you were never there in the first place?’) Chris, for his part, eagerly talks of the ‘indie pop’ solo material he’s been working on: ‘I was in the studio last night, in fact.’ Recalling his most recent – and perhaps most belittling – tabloid appearance, the tone is one of tickled delight. ‘A couple of months back I was outside the shop having a smoke, and a chat on my phone, when I see this guy with a big lens over the road … And there it is in the Sunday Star: “Is this the call that Jemini Chris has been waiting for all this time?”’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Alan, drily. ‘The Samaritans.’

  Everybody laughs, long and loud: no quarter is given or expected in the merciless goading that is a widely enjoyed Liverpudlian pastime. There’s more of the same when Gemma interrupts Chris’s excited discussion of his last broadcast appearance to inform us of the relevant show’s title: The 50 Most Embarrassing TV Moments.

  We drain beers; Alan slaps his thighs and rises. He’s arranged for the two of us to meet Simon O’Brien for a drink, and to my slight surprise the artists formerly known as Jemini express a desire to drive us there. ‘Simon O’Brien who lives out in Woolton?’ asks Gemma as we file out of Alan’s apartment; following confirmation she recalls waitressing in a café he runs.

  A minute later we’re all squeezed into Gemma’s Ford Ka, zipping out of the marina car park beneath the ominous concrete rocket of a Mersey Tunnel ventilation shaft. From the passenger seat Alan calls out the landmarks as we swish through the wet, black city: Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, the school that was once called Quarry Bank. Perhaps inspired, Chris leans forward beside me to embark on a proud résumé of Jemini’s achievements. ‘To this day I still think, Hang on, we’ve done the Eurovision Song Contest, we’ve done Top of the Pops, we had a number fifteen single and we’re still only twenty-two.’

  ‘I’m twenty-three,’ murmurs Gemma, the spectacles she wears to drive pressed very close to the rainy windscreen.

  ‘I bet we’re the only UK Eurovision act most people could name from the last five years,’ Chris persists, rather more stridently. ‘Even when I’m dead, people will remember Jemini. Maybe our performance wasn’t that great, but at least we’ve come away with … we’ve got our …’ He slowly settles back in his seat, as if suffering a slow puncture. ‘Dignity’ and ‘intact’ were clearly the intended follow-up words, but even in full defiant flow Chris can’t quite bring himself to make this ambitious claim.

  To fill the awkward silence that follows, I ask if they’ll be watching the forthcoming Eurovision final. ‘Dunno,’ murmurs Gemma guardedly, yanking on the handbrake outside a pub, its etched-glass windows packed tight with silhouetted heads.

  ‘I’ve got to watch it,’ says Chris, as Alan steps out into a puddle with a half-stifled imprecation. ‘I’m intrigued now, always will be. I think if I watch, I can in some strange way influence the votes.’ Chris squirms out; I follow; he relocates himself in the front passenger seat. ‘And that way,’ he says, holding a hand through the window which I grasp and shake, ‘I can make sure that no one scores nul points again.’

  Two weeks later, peering at the scoreboard through a swaying forest of flags in Kiev’s Palace of Sport, I’m concentrating very hard on doing precisely that.

  21 May 2005 Palace of Sport, Kiev

  ‘DON’T MOCK,’ CHIDES the BBC Breakfast presenter, smiling archly from the flat screen that presides over the Heathrow departure gate, ‘but Eurovision’s here again.’ Well, we clearly haven’t learnt our lesson. When the heavily pregnant Jordan very nearly pipped Javine Hylton at A Song for Europe the month before my trip to Liverpool, the British flirted with the light-entertainment equivalent of sending a Church of the Militant Elvis MEP off to Brussels. It was an ugly lack of respect, made uglier by the lazy arrogance of our top-table status: as one of the EBU’s ‘big four’, we were exempt from the semi-final, which the night before had put paid to Eurovision founder-members Belgium and Holland, the once all-conquering Ireland and a dozen others.

  No mockery at least from the fellow passengers seated around me, all en route to the Ukraine for one reason and all charged with excited anticipation. The vaguely familiar young chap on my right blurtingly reveals himself as an ITV showbiz reporter: ‘You know what I’ve got in here?’ he asks, tapping the box on the seat beside him with a face like Christmas morning. ‘Javine’s boots! I’m on a footwear-for-the-final mercy dash!’ This revelation rouses the sombre middle-aged gent to my right to lean across with animated entreaties for a peek; young master ITV looks left and right before slipping the lid off for a quick flash of burgundy leather.

  As we file aboard, another unlikely Eurovision enthusiast in a crumpled trenchcoat turns to me: ‘So how many have you done, then?’ I don’t need to ask what he means, but when I tell him this is my first he sighs dreamily. ‘Ah … mine was Malmo, ‘92. Michael Ball, Johnny Logan. Well, you’re in for something special.’

  But then we all are: in a nostalgic return to the age of home-spun Eurovision innocence, the age of ‘Où est Harrogate’, we’re off into the unknown. Beyond an association with reactor-core meltdown and butter-stuffed breasts of chicken, I was heading to Kiev unburdened with intelligent expectation. When my eleven-year-old son had mentioned the previous evening that my destination was the capital of Europe’s largest country, I’d almost choked in shame.

  Counterbalancing the Chernobyl Prejudgement was proving rather more of a challenge than I’d hoped. My seat-pocket copy of What’s on Kyiv introduces itself with an editorial that begins: ‘For many years, Kyiv was perceived as an uninteresting hovel.’ No attendant ‘but’ could ever be big enough to make up the ground lost there. And consulting the email print-out that confirms my reservation for two nights at the Hotel Bratislava, I discover a footnote warning guests that ‘there will be no Hot Water at the hotel for the period 7-20 June’.

  Three hours later my ITV friend is helpfully fast-tracking me through the bespoke Eurovision lane at Kiev arrivals, and thence, across a sun-warmed car park lavishly bedecked with commemorative banners, on to the coach that’s shuttling us to the Palace of Sport. Through a window ominously crazed by the impact of some hefty projectile, I watch the traffic and street furniture spool bumpily by: Moskviches, ex-military lorries hauling trailers of vast logs, a rusted multilingual sign alertin
g passers-by to the nearby presence of the Exhibition of National Economic Achievements.

  Pine forests give way to decaying ranks of apartment blocks faced with oversized beige bath tiles; sallow youths in hooded tracksuits stare down from the ramshackle balconies. Atop a distant hill stands a gargantuan metal woman, her lofted sword shimmering mightily; long before I discover the Monument to the Motherland dates only from 1981, it’s apparent that here is a country with an oppressively recent Soviet past.

  Still, it’s warm, bright and, as we rumble into the city centre, almost overbearingly green. Between the blocks, lilac trees and chestnuts blossom in extravagant profusion, and only now, right in the middle of town, do I understand the Nazis’ extraordinary plans to scrape off the Ukraine’s fertile black topsoil and freight it back to the fatherland. How shameful that Stalin’s brutally enforced agricultural collectivisation should induce famines that in 1933 and 1947 would cost three million lives in this land of plenty, and how unimaginably tragic that a further eight million Ukrainians were to perish during the significant conflict between these dates, a toll higher than that suffered even by Germany.

  With a history like that, and the direct links to it severed only months before by the ‘orange revolution’ that expelled a Soviet-throwback regime, it’s easy to understand why every lamppost in town has been annexed by a huge, green Eurovision 2005 banner. For Ukraine’s fledgling pro-Western democracy, the contest was a powerful symbol of European unity, imbued with all the weighty political significance of the Marcel-model original. And then some. In November 2004, with the orange revolution at its most critical juncture, reigning Eurovision champion Ruslana Lizhichko appeared in Kiev’s Independence Square to announce her own chosen protest against the fraudulent election result that had brought matters to a head. As the British were toying idly with the chortlesome prospect of sending a heavily pregnant, tone-deaf glamour model to represent them at the 2005 contest, the 2004 winner was embarking on a hunger strike.