War

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Last weekend I flew to place I love. Stockholm is the home of snow and thermal underwear at this time of year and my pampered, hot blooded, body was dragged shivering over there to record a TV show.

The week before I arrived the temperatures had dropped to minus fifteen degrees, so you can see why The Swedes have to be ever more inventive in keeping themselves amused over winter and trying to keep up their spirits. When the killjoys banned smoking in public spaces, for example, the Scandinavians quickly found a way round this inconvenience and they can now get their nicotine fix without anyone knowing about it. And it’s all thanks to tea bags.

In Sweden, men and women carry small round tin cans in their pockets filled with little, rectangular tea bags which are stuffed with tobacco. They don’t boil them up with a kettle full of hot water however but, instead, stuff them whole and entire in their mouths and lay them over the top gum so that the area below their nose bulges out like a bad day at the dentist. They all look like they have a hair lip.

I can’t tell you how surprising it is the first time to see men taking out their used, saliva filled old tea bags while talking to you and stuffing a new one in there without breaking their conversational flow. Perhaps “surprising” isn’t the right word, but I’m trying to be polite here.

Anyway, brown teeth, cancerous gums and breath like the remnants of a trawlerman’s pipe doesn’t stop the Swedes from being very nice and kind and I looked forward to meeting many of them at dinner on Saturday evening. But, as we drove to the restaurant, the streets of Stockholm were deserted, almost as if the population knew I was coming and had decided to hide.

You may think I’m exaggerating but I promise you that the roads looked as if they’d been closed by a film company who were shooting Armageddon 2, all the bars were empty and the restaurants seemed filled with only echoing footsteps. Sweden had stayed at home on Saturday night and it was very eerie.

I later found out that the reason the capital was emptier than Paris Hilton’s head was because of a TV show. Everyone was at home watching A Song For Europe.

In the UK we find that completely unbelievable, but it’s true. Now I realise that for those of you reading this outside Europe the joys of A Song For Europe are a land of ecstasy and passion yet to be explored, so let me explain. And please don’t snigger.

Each year the countries that make up the continent of Europe recognise that there hasn’t been a Europe wide war since the nineteen forties so, like weekend warriors who dress up and recreate battles of the past, they remind themselves of the good old days by trying to beat the living daylights out of other countries by hurling unsettling and dangerous songs at each other.

The battlefield is usually a concert venue somewhere in Yugoslavia or Scandinavia and the event is hosted by two borderline local care in the community presenters who watch as each country’s songs explode on stage, the collateral damage inflicted on our ears leading to casualties on a massive scale, and you can almost hear shouts of “Incoming, Incoming” as one dreadful sheep herder after another takes to the stage to sing songs about the glories of cheese or inter marrying, with a chorus along the lines of “Fa, la la, la la, la lee”, while his partner plays a solo on the accordion.

In case you think I’m looking down on the whole event let me state clearly that, in this annual war, Britain bravely conjures up the Churchill spirit and gallantly loses every time. And we lose big. We can’t even win a song contest where being bad is good. We’re so bad, we’re just bad.

Our entry this year has been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber who has put together some off cuts from Cats or Phantom of the Opera and given these to Diane Warren, an American who has written more hit songs for Celine Dion and others than I have acne scars. She’s a star and should be above all this, but I can only assume Webber has threatened to kill her cats as she’s flown over to the UK and has had to adapt to the musical trench warfare. Webber and Warren have both now given us a song that is so bad it would have been removed by the publishers from a “My First Piano Book”, and I can promise you that kids would turn their noses up at any kindergarten recital and refuse to bang their tambourine and xylophones to this one.

Last year we came last, as we did in 2003, but at least we’re not political losers. Georgia has selected as its entry this year a disco band called 3G who echo the sentiments of their whole country by taking a swipe at the event’s hosts this year. Quite what Russia’s head Vladimir Putin will make of their song We Don’t Want A Put In, where they manage to rhyme Put In with Shoot ‘em, is anyone’s guess.

Countries vote tactically for other, friendly, countries and so Norway’s entry, a band called Wig Wam who look like Seventies glam rockers led by a transsexual fat lady with big sunglasses, came to Stockholm to beg for votes, saying the Swedish entry has no chance.

And this is just the start. The contest isn’t until May but before then, if I’m exposed to much more of this Eurovision stuff, I’ll have to take up smoking to calm my nerves. Or chewing tea bags.