Lifting the veil on the real nightmare of Eurovision

It’s not sour grapes because a Jedward win would be more of a cause for national embarrassment than euphoria – but quite honestly at this stage it has to be asked ... what is the point of Eurovision?

It doesn’t bear even a passing resemblance to the current musical taste; the winners rarely make even the slightest impact on the charts, and it costs us a considerable sum to participate in an event where qualifying for a final with 28 participants somehow qualifies as success.

And perish the thought, what if we had landed the golden prize? Where would RTÉ – a station in turmoil on all fronts and currently trying to cut €25 million in costs – have found the cash to stage this extravaganza?

We need to be more careful in the future; we can’t afford to send acts that will make it to the final – even if the suspense on semi-final night tricked us into thinking we were safe, before John and Edward made it in as the final golden ticket of the ten qualifiers.

In fairness, they made sure there would be no such suspense during the voting process on final night as – not for the first time – the only issue was whether or not we’d finish above the UK in the relegation zone. The other burning question was whether the dinosaur that is old Englebert Humperdink would live long enough to see the marathon voting process through to the bitter end.

The Swedish girl was terrific – and that’s a phrase that rolls all too easily off the tongue – but she’s no Abba either. But at least she rescued us from another dose of the Baltics by taking the contest to a country that is at least run as a democracy in 2013.

To sum up Eurovision as a whole – mediocre songs, appalling presenters, more smaltz than you’d find at an Abba reunion and somehow on top of it all, this year’s event was an effort to portray a country with one of the worst records on civil rights in the world in a positive light.

Panorama’s Paul Kenyon nailed that particular project with its expose of the truth about Azerbaijan in Eurovision’s Dirty Secret before the first semi-final even took to the air.

The BBC man was tailed by government spies everywhere he went – and there was nothing covert about it either – but he still painted a picture of a country ruled by a dictator and rotten to the core.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.