The power of song

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how we might choose to vote in the coming referendum. Surely it’s just a string of naff pop songs stuck together with fake glitter and a lot of false jollity? The songs are uniformly terrible, the show so overproduced it’s impossible not to mock its grandiosity, the idea that it conjures up the meaning of Europe laughably misplaced. But in a programme for the World Service that caught my attention because it sounded so counterintuitive, Nicola Clase, head of mission at the Swedish embassy in London, tried to persuade us otherwise.

In The Swedish Ambassador’s Guide to Eurovision on Wednesday (just days before this year’s jamboree), she argued that it’s worth watching every year — not for the music but to find out the mood in Europe and what’s really going on behind the glacial smiles of those national representatives as they share out their votes.

Take 1995, for instance, when Norway was infamously given ‘nul points’ by its Swedish neighbour. The insult went deep because it was watched by 200 million viewers across the continent, and all the Norwegian papers demanded an official apology from the Swedish ambassador. Or 2011, when Azerbaijan was the host after winning the contest the year before. Its president was told quite sharply by the organisers that if he didn’t clean up his country’s record on human rights the ‘abundance of undisciplined journalists’ who would arrive in the capital to write up the show would be submitting stories about its lack of democracy rather than the music.

Even more revealing perhaps is Britain’s decline and fall as a Eurovision contender. Once upon a time we were often favourites to win but our last winner was Katrina and the Waves in 1997, significantly just after Tony Blair’s victory in the polls.