Eurovision is to music what a Big Mac is to haute cuisine. It kind of sounds like music and it looks like music, but thereafter, any real relationship to music is lost in a kind of homogenizer, a machine that is dedicated to extracting the last ounce of originality and binning it. All that is left are all the right notes, but not, necessarily in the right order.
I always found circuses disappointing and I always ended up hoping the performer would fall off. That is how I view the Eurovision Song Contest. It is boring and it would only get interesting if a singer fell off the stage or got hit by the pyrotechnics. As for this year's effort, it was marginally better than some, but the bar has been set very low. You can remember ABBA doing Waterloo because it went on to become one of the best-selling singles of all time. That was just over 30 years ago and ABBA were up there with The Beatles. Who is going to remember this year's winner in 30 years? As for our entry, by Bonnie Tyler, well. The story is that some nameless person at the BBC unilaterally decided that Bonnie, now in her sixties and probably no stranger to HRT and Tena Lady should be the shining face of Great Britain. I hope this BBC executive is sacked for gross something or other. Poor Bonnie sang flat. I suppose it will be blamed on poor ear monitors or something, but she was flat and that is that.
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I was amused to read about another story (fake or otherwise, but very believable) that the EU have decided to ban un-bottled olive oil from restaurant tables because they think the punters should be allowed to see the origin of such condiments. I have to agree with this one, especially since it is countries like Italy who voted for the rule. Italy has had the largest number of scandals in this area, mainly due to the intervention in the olive oil market of the mafia and the mafia don't exercise the same health and safety food standards as other multi-nationals. Of course, this is all our fault for going a bit Brian Sewell about olive oil. If we were not so obsessed with extra virgin nobody would bother to fake it.
I am sorry, but this time I must side with the EU. Un-labeled olive oil stands a chance of coming from the drained sump of a Fiat 500 from a back-street garage in Naples, along with Mozzarella with added dioxin and spag bol made of Shergar.
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Another scandal threatens to undermine the Tories. This time it's "Swivel-Eyed Loon" gate. Regardless of who said what to whom, the sad thing is that the story is 100% believable; the Tory leadership is just out of touch with its grass roots. Cameron must take the blame on this. He has never been interested in listening to the country or, more importantly, his old Tory core vote. I shall never forget the early days before he became PM. He ran a kind of video diary where he invited people to email him. It was all very intimate and cinema verite and obviously done by a PR firm. I emailed a comment and got a very accidental reply from the guy who read the comments at Tory central. It was pretty obvious that Cameron never read the comments, nor was he remotely interested in them. Cameron is a phoney. He is an unbelievable phoney and someone who has no credible answer to the long term problems we face. He will lose the next election, not because he is posh, but because he bears no resemblance to a member of the human race.
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