by Tim Moore
When Viktor Yushchenko first sat down at the presidential desk on the morning of 23 January 2005, he got out the photo of his kids, labelled the stapler STOLEN FROM VIK’S OFFICE and then immediately announced a determination to seize with both hands the opportunity handed to Ukraine by Ruslana’s victory in Turkey. Eurovision’s executive supervisor Svante Stockselius, no doubt accustomed to being met at the airport by a bored culture-ministry factotum, must have been modestly astounded to find his routine progress meeting two weeks afterwards upgraded to a full-on state visit. President Yushchenko grabbed Svante’s hand for the photographers and emotionally declared that the forthcoming contest was more than the dawning of a new cultural era; hosting ‘the biggest event in Ukrainian history’ would allow the nation to entertain and educate 400 million fellow Europeans, and so move closer towards the goal of EU membership. Was it an accident that within two years of staging the Eurovision final, both Estonia and Latvia found themselves amongst the newest stars on the EU flag? Or that only eight months after the Istanbul final, Turkey’s application was being considered rather more carefully? ‘Any events that contribute to the integration of Ukraine into Europe are important and sacred,’ quavered the president, fixing the gingery Swedish bureaucrat beside him with a flinty stare. ‘At the EBU you do things that diplomats cannot and will not do. We are soldiers on your side.’
‘Douze points!’ Svante might have responded.
‘Awakening’ was selected as the 2005 contest’s motto (regrettably pipping ‘Ukraine: Setting Europe’s Heart on Fire!’), and the president backed up his portentous words by allocating to the contest a hefty chunk of the state TV broadcaster’s annual budget. The nation’s Eurovision entry, dubiously victorious at a national selection final it hadn’t actually qualified for, was a blaringly pro-Viktor revolutionary anthem composed and performed by Greenjolly, three plump and nerdish DJs best known for their previous endeavours in ‘comedy reggae’. ‘No to falsification, yes to Yuschenko.’ Get down!
The coach hisses to a halt outside the mighty hulk of mid-sixties Communism that is the Palace of Sport, lavishly swathed in green and guarded by an absurd surfeit of policemen in vast peaked caps. The ITV man runs off with Javine’s boots, and following many mimed exchanges with grumpy, clueless big-hats, and some inefficient blundering amongst the outside-broadcast lorries (one from the BBC; three alone from Swedish national broadcaster SVT) I wind up in the accreditation tent. After an hour of photography, data entry and telephone calls, my face emerges from the laminator in the centre of an orange card rather than the blue press pass I’d been promised by email.
‘What does orange mean?’ I ask the jolly girl who threads a chain through the pass and hangs it round my neck.
‘See? It reads here.’
I read there, FAN, it says.
A fan? A fan? The Wogan cloven hoof pops out: I’m not walking about for forty-eight hours declaring my strident neck-bound allegiance to one of the cultural world’s least esteemed communities.
It’s only when I’m struggling excitedly through the tent’s plastic flaps with a hefty armful of complimentary merchandise that I accept the authenticity of that laminated label. I could in theory make my life a lot easier by folding, squashing and wedging all these pens and clocks and umbrellas into the lime-green messenger bag, but I just can’t bring myself to despoil them so. And how, I wonder, could I even fleetingly have contemplated using this lovely Eurovision Awakening carrier bag for my dirty socks and pants? Oh, I’m a fan all right.
Indeed it’s becoming plain that almost all the foreigners on this side of the security cordon are mixing business and pleasure: in a refreshing departure from the weary cynicism that journalists strive to master, all the blue-badges around are chattering breathlessly, eyes wide. Greece, oh yes, still number one for me! Very unlucky Iceland I think. And this Portugal girl who faints in semi-final – too, too funny! But of course also sad.
An enormous proportion are men trying to look younger than they are, accreditations slung across tightly T-shirted chests, sunglasses propped on carefully gelled heads: if you’re a gay journalist, Eurovision is the Oscars. The day before I’d read that the official Eurovision nightclub was packed with husband-fishing Ukrainian women wondering what they were doing wrong. By the same token, I’ve already given up hope of finding a bar anywhere near the Palace of Sport that’s likely to be showing the following afternoon’s FA Cup final.
I’m grateful to Andy Roberts, an occasional contributor to Attitude magazine, for nobly endeavouring to explain why by the age of twelve he was dancing around to chubby Yugoslavian divas using his dressing-gown cord as a feather boa. ‘Eurovision is the Lady Di of international competition,’ he emailed me some months later. ‘At the end of three hours I feel head-fucked but contented, as if I’d just shagged a fit relative.’ Perhaps it’s just as well that Marcel Bezençon died in 1981.
Outside the security cordon I bundle myself and my belongings into the Lada at the head of the cab queue. After some fruitless key action and a weary oath, the driver leans out of his open window and shouts to the cabbies behind; a moment later we’re being push-started past the courtesy coaches. The Lada bucks into life and then we’re thudding and rattling through the traffic, the inrushing wind blowing the driver’s fag ash straight into my eyes. Reaching down for my window winder, I find only a greasy hole in the hand-painted door trim.
We judder to a halt outside a careworn suburban high-rise with many Cyrillic letters missing from the sign flickering atop its scabbed, off-white superstructure in the early-evening gloom. ‘Bratislava,’ says the driver, before writing down a figure for the fare, which seems reasonable enough until I’m standing at a metro ticket office the morning after, being asked to pay precisely one hundredth that amount for a trip back into town.
In six stops, my journey from Darnytsia station offers the complete post-Soviet experience, a lingering portrait of a nation caught between Intervision past and Eurovision future. Our spartan, broad-beamed carriage is incongruously crowded with commercial exhortations that slather the walls and scroll across advertising monitors retro-fitted to the ceiling, ordering the heavy-eyed strap-hangers beneath to lose weight, invest in a cameraphone or, most regularly, to LEARN ENGLISH AND BE AU PAIR! At one point a middle-aged woman carrying two buckets gets on, robotically dictates some spiel and then walks the length of the carriage failing to interest us in her wares, which as she passes I note are tiny cardboard packets each containing a single sticking plaster.
I’d provisionally arranged to meet two people in Kiev, and a text from one of them buzzes against my hip as I wander past bench-bound, Saturday-morning beer enthusiasts whilst failing to find the old town and its loudly trumpeted cosily historic ambience. It’s Zhenya, a Kiev-based friend-of-a-friend, apologising for his unexpected absence from the city: ‘Unfortunately I’ve take strong order from boss about urgent business trip,’ he reports, going on to wish both the UK and Ukraine ‘big luck in contest tonight’. Before retrousering my phone I give my other intended contact a call; like its predecessors, it goes unanswered. Andreas, fantastically, had vaulted the nationality barrier to bag himself a place in the Monaco delegation, and it was rather a blow to discover on arriving that the principality’s first ESC entry since 1979 hadn’t made it through the semi-final. Perhaps he’d already gone home; perhaps you couldn’t get reception behind the locked door of a Sport Palace lavatory.
That this is the city’s big day, its Olympics, its Expo, becomes obvious well before I’m in sight of that green-swaddled auditorium. The day before, every street corner had been dotted with headscarved old dears in long coats and dirty trainers, condemned by the end of the Soviet jobs-for-all era to hawk a tragic selection of goods from spring onions to kittens; no sign of their tone-lowering presence this morning. The shop windows gleam, and in the bright sun it looks as if the church domes have been regilded overnight. Coming from a nation of Eurovision boo-boys, I still can’t quite believe what h
osting the final means to these people.
I’ve been wondering what my fan ID actually entitles me to, other than a lingering sense of embarrassment and the right to share a Portaloo with 10,000 dumpling-reared policemen, and inside the Palace of Sport compound I find out that it isn’t a ticket for the final. Fighting my way to the box office through the hordes of pestering touts who have unmysteriously been allowed through the ring of steel, I discover the cheapest remaining tickets ambitiously priced at the thick end of a hundred quid. That’s more than I’ve ever outlaid to access any live event, and I’ve been to a World Cup. Then again, I reason whilst assembling a vast pile of notes on the counter, if tonight turns out to be even half as much fun as watching Scotland lose to Costa Rica I won’t be complaining.
There are four hours to go, and I spend two of them on a bench by the stage door, eating half a pound of smoked ham and receiving cup-final text updates from kindly minded sources back home. Just after halftime there’s an abrupt media scrum as the artists emerge from their final rehearsal. My nul-points radar bleeps into life: as the parade of tiny, blinged-up dollies files slowly out, I examine each lavishly hand-painted face in turn, willing them all to betray no fear or weakness. But watching them work the snappers, pouting, waving, bending down to dangle their hair extensions at a puppy, I’m instead affected by the heart-rending pointlessness of all this eager excitement.
As Jemini’s failure and Ruslana’s fur-cloaked, whip-cracking triumph had proven, in the televote era Eurovision was all about the show, not the actors. In the Bratislava’s Formica-panelled lobby I’d watched a BBC World interview with Bill Martin, co-composer of Puppet on a String and Congratulations. ‘Right up to the eighties all the big songwriters would enter,’ he sighed, ‘but these days Eurovision is just a choreographic bonanza.’ How sad to look at those little women with their bleached and brilliant smiles and know that for almost all, as for my more recent nul-pointers, this would be it: the beginning, middle and end of their celebrity careers.
Meandering through the throng that mills about the corporate tents and stalls in the Palace of Sport forecourt, I’m at last brought face to flag-painted face with Eurovision’s fanbase: after all my impersonal online contact with ESC obsessives, it’s disarming to be so suddenly engulfed by such a huge, happy throng of them. But what an extraordinary assortment. Scanning the sea of horned helmets, mauve wigs and greasy-fringed bespectacled squints, I crudely split my Euro-mates into three groups, by motto: ‘I’m mad, me’, ‘I’m gay, me’ and ‘Measured from the tip of her sword, Kiev’s Monument to the Motherland is the world’s fourth-tallest sculpted figure’.
A human beer bottle trailing a wheeled crate of free samples waddles swiftly past, pursued by a gigantically fat flag-carrying Norwegian squeezed into a pink satin biker suit. This isn’t the gay Oscars, I realise, but the gay World Cup, a chance for men in pink biker suits to plumb the depths of public drunkenness with the national flag draped round their shoulders. (‘Where else can you support Britain without getting spat on or arrested?’ slurs a man I later meet in the hot-dog queue.)
Clanking a couple of brewed freebies into my messenger bag I wander up to a trio of quiet men in little plastic Union Jack bowler hats. ‘It’s just a great experience,’ says the youngest, in pancake-flat Lancastrian, when I ask him to encapsulate the contest’s appeal. ‘You know, a laugh.’ He shares his first Eurovision memory with Chris Cromby – Sonia in 1993 – but a rather more grizzled associate volunteers a CV that goes right back to a place in the Brighton stalls the night that ABBA took the crown.
The smug tone with which I announce that the UK jury failed to award Waterloo a single point proves ill-advised. ‘Well, that’s right,’ he says, realigning his bowler, ‘and neither did Italy, Belgium, Greece or Monaco.’ It’s the sort of mild-mannered monomania I’ve only really experienced face to face with motorhome-dwelling followers of the Tour de France.
I ask them who’s going to win, and receive three top-five predictions, each delivered with the quick-fire, cocksure authority of a racing punter. Querying the United Kingdom’s absence from the list, I’m treated to looks of withering disdain. ‘A Popstars reject?’ sneers one. ‘Haven’t we learnt our lesson?’
‘Javine was so flat in the rehearsal we hid our flags under the seat,’ says his young friend. ‘And now we’re hearing she’s got a sore throat. We’ll be lucky if we get a point.’ Oh no. Please don’t say that. Maybe she can’t sing without her lucky shoes.
There are many Greeks, Turks and Scandinavians about, but I’m greatly surprised at the predominance of Union Jacks. ‘Well, there were 20,000 of us at the Athens Olympics,’ says middle-aged Brummie Joan, after I inveigle myself rather clumsily into her flag-faced coterie. ‘More than any other visiting supporters, I was told.’ She’s been here for a remarkable two weeks, sightseeing with a diligence that has seen her visit every station on the metro (‘It’s magic: you can go ten stops for the price of a pee back home!), yet isn’t quite sure why she’s here at all. ‘I suppose it’s a chance to see a different way of life,’ is her unconvincing justification. Surveying Joan’s friends, with their George-Cross afro wigs and red-blue beards, I’m imagining there’s a bit of a Barmy Army thing going on here, the impulse that encourages otherwise stolid Middle Englanders to rise up from Henman Hill and head off to plant the flag in foreign fields.
I’m planning a rueful, disappointed nod when a man wearing a small inflatable bulldog on his head leans over Joan with a thoughtful expression. ‘It’s just nice to be here with all these other countries,’ he says, angling his head at a nearby rosy-cheeked Swede, flag painted inside a heart on either cheek, who’s happily waltzing with a similarly decorated British counterpart. By the time we’re all shuffling into the Palace of Sport, I’m infused with a warm, fraternal idealism. Turk arm-in-arm with Greek, gay with straight, Brit with … um (Excuse me, what’s that flag on your forehead? Great – thanks) Belarusian: here we are, Marcel, fifty years on and still breaking down barriers and borders through the international language of funny music.
Aided by the beer, which I’m surprised to find on sale in bold abundance, inside the Palace of Sport lobby this tolerant goodwill is being celebrated with raucous abandon. Beneath the boxer’s-mansion chandeliers and soaring ruched drapes, dozens of drum-battering Montenegrans are paying ear-bleeding tribute to Ukraine’s president and its principal football team, Dinamo Kiev. The many locals in attendance respond with enthusiastic but unintelligible chants of their own, and soon it’s an ale-slopping, red-faced, vocal free-for-all.
Somewhere in the cacophony a PA announcer is trying to make herself heard, but she’s given up long before the general realisation sinks in that the show is about to start with no one yet in their seats. A full-scale crowd surge is underway when I sprint towards my recommended entrance, one which carries me helplessly past the shrugging stewards and into the vast, stagy darkness of the auditorium. Men in headphones are running around in yelping panic, tapping fingers on wristwatches, pushing people up staircases and failing to reanimate the crowd-control personnel. I’m right up against the side of the multi-level stage, in a flabby, multinational conga of flag-hugging inebriates, when a giant screen above is filled with swirling graphics and the Te Deum fanfare blasts ceremonially around the hall. The men in headphones sag; this sorry shambles is now going out live to 400 million homes.
Lights flare into sudden life and there’s last year’s winner Ruslana just above us, doing her Xena: Warrior Princess thing, only this time with a flame thrower. Our proximity to its satanic muzzle sparks off a sudden retreat, so sudden that the tall Slavic chap beside me cops a glancing blow as a boom-mounted camera strafes our skulls. In the mêlée thus unleashed we’re rather roughly rounded up by a fluorescent-vested snatch squad, and as the young comperes step out to a reception of deranged cheers I’m being shouldered up a staircase whose numbering bears no relation to what’s on my ticket. But a small horde of leather-clad Magyar gypsies is alr
eady stomping on to the stage; I spot a space, tread on a lot of toes, and a moment later I’m wedged in a modest sliver of half-seat left between the encroachments of a bollard-thighed, flag-cheeked local and two stout red-faces who are swaying, cheering and – oh my, is that a tear? – generally surrendering themselves to the performance now ending. ‘Och, this is just too much!’ shouts one to the other amidst thunderous applause.
Breathless and dishevelled, I endeavour to take stock. Twelve rows up and stage left, beyond the heavily compromised hip room this is a great seat – that much is plain from the ominous preponderance of squat, tuxedoed gangland types and their unsmiling, stick-like blonde companions, all owners of feet I now deeply regret stamping on. Beyond and all around it’s dark, and huge, and chantingly boisterous, more like a fight crowd were it not for that pink Norwegian running up and down the lower aisles with his nation’s flag hoist high.
OK – there’s the scoreboard, here’s my bag, there’s the beer in it, and here’s the programme … Oh, butter my arse: Javine’s on next! I just don’t feel ready for this. The hosts – he in black tie, she ruffled up in mauve chiffon like a big-box Easter egg – step out again, deliver some unintelligible staged quip in their please-to-welcome-all English, and then here’s that young woman in those shoes. ‘Oh God,’ comes a rearward stage mutter, ‘here we go.’
I watch Javine and her modest coterie of dancers shimmy and shuffle, and hear her repeat the bhangra-flavoured song’s title (touch my fie-YAH!’) a great many times. It’s an unambitious spectacle by contemporary Eurovision standards, but is that enough to guarantee a points embargo? As she strikes and holds her final pose and the Union Jacks flutter out all around the four-square, industrial auditorium, I begin to fear that it may be. More so when the downbeat critics behind swiftly damn her performance with the very faintest of praise. ‘Well,’ drones one, ‘at least she was in tune.’