AND WE THINK Jedward’s hairdos are scary? They’re mild, frankly, compared to Michelle Rocca’s curly-wurly perm and Pat Kenny’s quiff – multiplied and magnified in our photo to nightmarishly outsized dimensions on the electronic wall behind their woolly heads.
In April 1988, Johnny Logan having conquered Belgium the previous year with Hold Me Now, RTÉ was gearing up to host the Eurovision for the second time in a decade. Not only that, but we Irish had decided that the contest was quaint and outdated. Video producer Declan Downey was brought in to revamp the show for a younger generation, and the RDS stage was duly dominated by the Philips Vidiwall; “a revolutionary, high-tech set that looks”, an Irish Times report noted, “like Steven Spielberg’s soundstage for Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.
Well, quite.
There was far more excitement over the Vidiwall than there was over our 1988 Eurovision entry, Jump the Gun’s piano ballad Take Him Home. There was, naturally, a bit of mild hoo-ha about the cost of it all – though the show’s executive director, Liam Miller, stoutly maintained that RTÉ had spent as much on the Eurovision as it would on “one hour of high-quality drama or several years of Dempsey’s Den”.
Just in case you’re wondering whether the station had decided to save money by disguising Rocca and Kenny as ordinary, everyday 1980s commuters, fear not. Our photo was taken at a rehearsal. On the night, Pat was dolled-up like a waiter at a Michelin-starred restaurant, complete with silver bow-tie. Michelle, meanwhile – as befitted the futuristic theme for the night that was in it – was dressed as a character from Star Wars, her perm sprayed solidly into a fetching Tellytubbies-style aerial thingummibob.
In the end, it all went went swimmingly. Jump the Gun achieved a respectable eighth place and it was left to Austria to snag the traditional “nul points”. The half-time entertainment was a snazzy new video from a young Irish band by the name of Hothouse Flowers. The winner? Switzerland’s Celine Dion, with the ruthlessly upbeat Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi and a curly-wurly perm of her own.
Oh, those Eurovisions of the past. Jedward are just regular dudes by comparison.
