Everything more is more again in Dusseldorf!

It's Eurovision time again. We just watched the second night's broadcast, billed as the semi finals. The finals are on SBS 1 tomorrow night (15 May). Last year Eurovision was disappointingly bland but this year the excess and tenuous musicianship we have come to love were back in spades! Here is a run down of some of the acts that made the biggest impression.

There is always a strong soft porn aesthetic to the pop music business and Eurovision presents its own special version. Maja Keuc of Slovenia went the bondage/thigh high boot route with her costume for 'No One' (or 'No Win' as I prefer to think of it) and had a group of girl backing singers that look like a Supré window display come to life. One of these young ladies appears to be adjusting herself in the pic above.

Former (1998) Israeli winner transsexual Dana International seemed a strong contender when her song 'Ding Dong' was announced, standing as it does in a long line of silly Eurovision song titles: 'Boom Bang-a-Bang' (UK, 1969), 'A-Ba-Ni-Ba' (Israel, 1978), 'Bana Bana' (Turkey, 1989) and 'Bourn Badaborun' (Monaco, 1967). Perhaps on reflection though the choice of consonant may be ill advised. Any way the song, her performance and couture were so dull (see below) that they made one long for Fran Drescher's sense of style and vocal projection!

From Romania came Hotel FM with their clicky, clappy, catchy 'Change' a contender despite its un-Eurovision defeatist lyric 'I can't change the world alone'. We liked their Romanian pianist much more than their English lead singer so here (below) is the only picture I could find which shows he snacks healthily as well as vamping appealingly.



Almost all the songs we heard tonight were sung in English which I know is often contentious in the competing countries. But it matters little as most lyrics were incomprehensible any way. Thank goodness for SBS's Julia Zemiro and Sam Pang and their elucidating commentary.

Each song's title at least was generally left ringing in the ears. This was definitely so with the subtle 'I Love Belarus' (yes, Belarus's entry), Moldova's quirky 'So Lucky', Ireland's 'Lipstick' and Estonia's Rockerfeller Street. Rockerfeller Street was performed by 18 year old Getter Jaani (left), she is delightful, can really wear magenta and started her performance with a magic trick. The number's art direction was pretty cool using a graphic model cityscape, perhaps a bit too cool to be real Eurovision material - don't recall many lighting effects or pyrotechinics at all.

Irish entrant Jedward are twins John and Edward Grimes. They are very BOUNCY, suggesting Father Ted's Ardal O'Hanlon on acid. Their personal stylist clearly disdains gravity and has an open ended budget for hair spray. The way this hyperenergetic, Warholesque pair perform Lipstick is described quite accurately in Wikipedia as 'a dayglo wad of electroglammy bubblegum' (I'd love to credit that but Wikipedia didn't). They are a lot of fun and are through to the finals. Also high in the quirky stakes is Moldova's Zdob si Zdub with 'So Lucky' - their usual pub rock image altered by donning tall hats which the Eurovision website calls 'cosmic antennae' but looked more as if they came straight from the gnome section at the Garden Centre. However their ska influenced song and their unerring unicycling made them one of this year's more memorable acts!

While members of Zdob si Zdub were prepared, for their art's sake, to look as if home was Dingly Dell, we saw no costumes as grotesque as those of 2008's winner Finnish Heavy metal band Lordi's. Remember them? Sort of dinosuar bikers!

Pretty boy and barbie doll lead singers did abound however. Macedonia's Vlatko Ilievski is right out of a menswear catalogue but our focus readily wandered from his chiseled profile in disbelief to his stumbling Zorba-style backing dancers one of whom inserted an accordion solo seemingly randomly into the performance. More twins, female this time, from Slovakia teetered on 8 inch heels, the wind machine causing their golden tresses to play about their even more golden fake tanned shoulders and cleavages. Despite the fact that their song contained only 5 notes the girls managed to avoid all of them!

I could go on but I am spoilt for choice (and we only saw a fraction of the acts, go to http://www.eurovision.tv/ for the full catastrophe). There was the impressive lap of honour, guitar in hand and presumably still being strummed, done by one of the 3Js, boarding school pupils from the Netherlands who've formed a boy band. (Maybe some sort of Chariots of Fire homage?). There was Ukranian Mika Newton replete in angels wings, singing, appropriately enough, Angel, whilst projected behind her were images of pathos trickled from the hand of 'sand artist' Kseniia Simonovia. There was Musiqq from Latvia comprising a chubby boy (I think he is only 17) and an early Elvis Costello look alike - the ill fitting waistcoats there wore looked vaguely better on the Elvis clone. And did I glimpse the Swedish soubrette suffer a tiny wardrobe malfunction a la Janet Jackson towards the end of her act?

Definitely a return to form by the teeming mass of celebrity wannabes and pop chart hopefuls from the northern hemisphere. The electricity bill for special effects and online voting (or 'woting' as one of the Dusseldorf anchors referred to it) would take about 1,000 earth hours to offset and the ostentation of makeup and costuming on display means that none of us need ever feel overdressed again! And the winner is... who knows or cares? Eurovision has already delivered.

Jedward, like Ardal O'Hanlon on acid.

Stop Press: Ell/Nikki from Azerbaijan has won the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest with 221 points (pronounced 'pwants'). We didn't see this entry last night so just Googled the You Tube clip which begins with a lot of 'ooh, ooh' noises and a Golden retriever leaving the set. We know how the dog felt!

Ellis massively unreconstructed

Bob Ellis and I are in disagreement. I usually have a lot of time for the old grouch with his loverly libertarian values and his delicious turns of phrase. But Mr Ellis, Bob, M*A*S*H, I Love Lucy and Hepburn-Tracey movies are not real life. They are not the appropriate paradigm for making a judgement about gender politics or ethics within the armed forces. They are in fact the very opposite of an analysis of these things in that they are creative products which deliberately treat some of the more fraught aspects of the human condition with humour and optimism.

Comments in your Drum article on the recent ADF Sex Scandal are really sloppy thinking. You seem to claim that because sexist behaviour has been a constant in society and the army, a female cadet who finds herself filmed in a private act of sex, who did not give her consent for that act to be broadcast and humiliatingly distributed and who is then further publicly embarrassed with an ill-timed unrelated disciplinary hearing should content herself with tearful phone call to Mum and then just get over it.

Perhaps it has escaped you, Bob, but we accord different levels of approbation to men and women when they are caught en flagrante. Whatever advances feminism may have made, a twenty something young woman stands to lose a whole lot more in terms of self respect, the respect of others, credibility, confidence, the ability to pursue her career (the list goes on) if she is at the centre of an event like this than do male footballers, cadets, entertainers and sundry 'larrikins'! It is not, to coin a cliche, a level playing field.

On this topic, your heart and mind are closed and your arguments are glib. Must try harder.

Growing middle-aged disgracefully?

On a day when I have made the words 'hornier' and 'jism' in 2 separate (online) Scrabble games I am wondering what my vocabulary reveals about my unconscious. My family still treasures the serendipitous juxtaposition of 'anal' and 'splurges' in one of our Scrabble games some 3 decades ago. Who doesn't enjoy the occasional smutty word in Scrabble? The thing is, I have been having erotic dreams too. Quite graphic. Almost every night. And I managed to offend my peers at book group this weekend by mentioning the (supposedly) African maternal practice of sucking the snot out of a baby's nostrils to aid grooming and assist the infant to breath easy.

Does my lack of inhibition challenge ideas of propriety? I ask (rhetorically).

I was a very proper child (in the UK) in the 60s. I wore gloves and went to Sunday school. I didn't say the word 'damn' until I was eleven. I was desperately looking for my school shoes and my total recall of the exact context in which I uttered this profanity is proof of my immediate sense of self reproach. Even at fifteen, circa 1971, I thought if any man saw a mole about 5 cm above my cleavage we would be duty bound to marry.

Then there was the 1980s when I became a vigilante for feminism and social re-engineering and completely failed to notice when I was being flirted with and missed a lot of other subtle human interaction that makes life a joy.

How have I evolved into a fairly forthright, even libertarian middle-aged woman? (Rhetorical again). Well obviously experience changes our perceptions and alters our thresholds. There has been quite a bit of water under the bridge since my pious girlhood: love, lust, birth, death, encounters with all manner of achievements and addictions, my own and others'. Stuff like that makes its mark, and not in a bad way (take note, Pontiff). I still define myself as someone who generally wishes the human race well and upholds its rights and dignity. However my recipe has changed. I now believe in harm minimisation and Buddhist style non attachment. That probably sounds as rigid and joyless as my 1980s doctrines. What I actually mean is I no longer think the perfection of society is possible or even desirable, humans can be both magnificent and frail, we can not change this by endless regulation and we can not project our own yearnings and ideals onto others and expect anything but bewilderment and disappointment.

That is probably why I didn't experience the royal wedding as fairytale made flesh and I am not cock-a-hoop that Osama Bin Laden has been killed in a slick US military operation.

I do like a larf though and as well as Princess Beatrice's hat, a concept aired in one of my Uni lectures has tickled my fancy this week. I got the giggles when I heard about an organisational theorist, Gabriele Lakomski, who looks to birds' flocking behaviour and termites' mound creation as evidence of 'epiphenomenon' i.e. the false appearance of led or directed behaviour that parallels what occurs in organistaions within human society. Now is it just me, or is even what goes on at City Rail or Maccas a bit more complicated than following a pheremone trail and trying not to bump into your peers? That one's rhetorical too.

Anyway time for repose. I wonder what's on the soft core porn channel tonight?

Below: naughty postcards another shame of my youth and delight of my later years

Above: Jo Brand - I love her to bits and think 'Getting On' is the epitome of grown up complex telly!