Staging the Eurovision Song Contest, as Ireland can testify on the basis of more experience that any other participating country, can be a nightmare. Very good for tourism, what with all the international exposure of the host country's favourite sites and resorts slipped in between the songs, but not so good for State television broadcasters' budgets.
This year's contest, in Jerusalem tonight, is estimated to be costing about $7 million (£5.4 million). And the only thing likely to make Israel's cash-strapped TV chief Yair Stern's morose features cave in still further than they did last year - when Dana International stormed to victory and Stern realised he'd be facing the music a year on - is a repeat success: Israel's 1999 act winning the contest, and forcing Stern to go through the whole ordeal again in 2000.
But wait a minute. Perhaps Stern has no cause for concern after all. If Jacob (Jackie) Oved, the co-writer of this year's Israeli entry, Happy Birthday, is to be believed, Stern will be able to sit back and enjoy tonight's songfest secure in the knowledge that neither he, nor anybody else for that matter, will ever have to worry about staging Eurovision again.
Because Oved, you see, prefers these days to be called "The Prophet of the Lord". And he has it on the highest authority that neither the Eurovision Song Contest, nor much else of the world as we know it, will be around come the new millennium.
According to The Prophet, courtesy of a divine revelation two years ago, this October 7th will see the start of the "war of Gog and Magog", the beginning of the end of life on Earth. Mankind will survive, says The Prophet, only if we all start making peace and loving each other unconditionally. And, let's face it, that's a bit of a long shot.
So there it is. Hard to credit, but Israel, the country which last year dispatched a nice Yemenite Jewish boy turned transsexual to sing its song for Europe, sending its own ultra-Orthodox community hysterical with embarrassment and rage - compounded, of course, when somebody up there smiled on Dana and saw her through to victory - has managed, improbably, to outdo itself. Its 1999 offering is part-written by a man who thinks it's unlikely we'll make it to the year 2000.
Oh, and one more thing. Two of the four members of the group who'll perform the song aren't, er, actually Israeli citizens at all. In the wake of their appearance in Jerusalem tonight, should they be invited to play, say, at Dublin Castle or the Wembley Arena, it is perfectly conceivable that they'll be turned away on return to Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport. They are members of an obscure and curious religious sect, tolerated by but hardly beloved of the Israeli government, and their temporary residency permits expired last year.
Captured seven times by Ireland, the launch pad for the careers of Abba, Julio Iglesias and Celine Dion, entered (twice) but never won by Cliff Richard, ridiculed by large proportions of the "serious" music industry, the Eurovision Song Contest was first staged in Switzerland in 1956, having been conceived as a means of fostering partnership between the traumatised post second World War nations of Europe.
But since participation is open to all members of the European Broadcast Union, which encompasses countries (like Iceland, Cyprus and Israel) not normally found on maps of the continent, Israel has been a longstanding and unusually enthusiastic Eurovision regular. While other countries can only dream of matching the stream of Irish successes - from Dana in 1970, through Johnny Logan (1980 and 1987), Linda Martin (1992), Niamh Kavanagh (1993), Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan (1994) to Eimear Quinn (1996) - Israel does boast a perfectly respectable record, winning in 1978 and 1979, and coming high on several other occasions.
Nothing in Israel's Eurovision history, though, compared with the drama last year of Dana International. Coming amid a national climate of growing ultra-Orthodox Jewish influence, a sense that observant Jewish politicians were bent on restricting young secular Israel's effervescent culture, the rise of Ms International was a symbolic riposte, proof, as the unlikely diva put it herself on the night of her victory in London, that "God is on my side", on the side of society's less conventional members, too.
Ultra-Orthodox leaders spluttered about the Jewish state having been embarrassed by the publicity afforded this "abomination". "You can stick on whiskers and a tail," observed the deputy health minister, Rabbi Shlomo Benizri, in one of the scandalised community's more memorable comments on Yaron Cohen's metamorphosis into Dana, "but that doesn't turn you into a pussycat." And they resolved that, in defiance of hallowed Eurovision tradition, the winner's capital, Jerusalem, would not play host to this year's contest, for to do so would be to desecrate the holiness of the city.
Rabbi Haim Miller, the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem politician who fought hardest to relocate Eurovision to somewhere relatively "godless" - like Israel's southern tourist resort town of Eilat - could conceivably become his city's mayor not too many years from now. The current mayor, Ehud Olmert, a member of the same Likud party as Israel's newly-unseated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is now angling to become Likud chief. Rabbi Miller is one of his deputies, potentially poised to take over. And the ultra-Orthodox population and power in Jerusalem are growing year by year.
But, for now, Olmert still holds the reins, he has honoured his pledge that Eurovision would come to the holy city, and Dana International will be back again too. Provoking another furore from the frustrated ultra-Orthodox community, what's more, Dana, the so-called "interval act" - a spot between the performance of this year's 23 entries and the start of the international jury voting - is to sing a number entitled Dror Yikrah (Freedom Will Come), a tune more traditionally sung on the Sabbath in Orthodox Jewish homes.
Seventeenth to sing tonight will be Ireland's Bronagh and Karen Mullan, with When You Need Me, (see panel). Nineteenth, after the Austrian entry, will be Israel's four-boy band Eden. Except that two of them aren't really Israelis at all. Rafael Dahan and Doron Oren, unremarkable Israelis (except for their voices) are joined by (American-born) Gabriel Butler (36) and (Israeli-born) Eddie Butler (24), sons of African-Americans who moved here 30 years ago because, like their leader Ben Ammi Carter, they believed themselves to be members of one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Israel is always being "discovered" by would-be lost tribes-folk. The Ethiopian Jews, tens of thousands of whom have flowed to Israel in the past 20 years, are the only community to have had that claim formally accepted. But a few hundred Shinlung, from the India-Burma border, have managed to win citizenship in recent years, and the Lemba from South Africa carry genetic markers that appear to mark them out as potential descendants of the ancient Israelites. Carter's Black Hebrews have no such definitive proof of Israelite heritage, just a belief in their line of descent, a commitment to the observance of many, but not all, of the Orthodox Jewish commandments (there is a history of polygamy in the community), and a determination to live in Israel. "We do not subscribe to any religion," their Web site proclaims, "because religion has only divided men." Their observance of God, the site makes clear, is not centred on intermittent rituals and festivals, but "continuous", "24 hours a day".
On arrival here in 1969, three years after the Chicago-based Ben Ammi Carter had a vision that the time had come to head for the Holy Land, the 350 Black Hebrews were sent to Dimonah, a remote, impoverished, southern Negev town, whose sole claim to fame had hitherto been its proximity to Israel's nuclear power reactor.
The Butlers are hoping to change all that. Eden, described by their producer Moshe Datz (himself a respectable ex-Eurovision entrant, finishing third with his wife in 1991) as a cross between Boyz-men and the Bee Gees, have already put out a debut album, and enjoyed airplay here with a gospel-style first single.
Success tonight will not only launch their international careers, it might also embarrass Israel into according full citizenship to the now 2,000-strong Black Hebrew community.
When Dana International triumphed last year, tens of thousands of Israelis flooded into Tel Aviv's Rabin Square to celebrate. Boys very publicly kissed boys. Girls very happily kissed girls. The ultra-Orthodox community covered its eyes in horror.
Recently that same square - where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Orthodox Jews opposed to his peace policies - was packed again, with tens of thousands of Israelis celebrating the defeat of the hardline Prime Minister Netanyahu by the self-styled Rabin heir, Ehud Barak. The change of national mood, arguably presaged by Dana International, had been underlined at the ballot box. The moderates - those Israelis prepared to take risks for peace, and open-minded about the lifestyles of their country-folk - had prevailed.
Eden are hoping to cement that shift - to follow the success of a transsexual with the success of a multiracial band, and lead a liberated Israel towards the new millennium. Provided, of course, that the millennium doesn't end before it begins - that the optimistic, forward-looking lyrics to Happy Birth- day, penned by Jackie Oved before he "saw the light", prove more appropriate than the message of gloom he's spreading now. "May the year pass," the song urges, with typical Eurovision triteness, "with fun and joy and happiness." Gog and Magog can wait.
The Eurovision Song Contest is on BBC 1 and RTE 1 at 8 p.m. tonight