It is easy to knock the Eurovision Song Contest. Each year its tawdry format beams bright-eyed pictures of would-bes, wannabes and has-beens to millions of viewers across Europe and beyond.
Songs of love and longing tug the collective heart-strings of a community that never otherwise unites. Small countries, desperate for recognition, spend extravagantly on bad frocks and worse dance routines. The event is banal, tedious and out-of-touch. No wonder it gets such a hard time.
Lacking the elegance and social conscience Europe likes to see as its (exclusive) inheritance, Eurovision reduces Berlin-style culture to the level of a personal service ad. It massages the fear many Europeans encounter when they observe the crassness of pan-American television, singing of Jerry Springer without managing to be quite as slick.
Everyday alleluias resound through its down-home frame: boom-bang-a-bang moments of feeling the sun on your face or the tears in your heart as you're walking the streets in the rain. Epic tussles between mainstream European empires - Britain, France - must subordinate themselves to the emotional Waterloos of real life. Congratulations, its maniacal message seems to shout, Europe has bonded for one more year.
Eurovision was good to Ireland. It arrived at a time when the local diet had only recently discovered spaghetti and was years away from sampling the delights of pizza. The impossible glamour of seeing Irish people perform in an international context marked the apogee of the Late Late Show generation. Forget spaghetti, they were ready for nouvelle cuisine, and went on to devour it shamelessly.
Ireland's appetite for international ach ievement made the arena its own. The event even sounded strange. Citizens racked on the poles of Irish and English mimicked all those other languages in school yards and barrooms around the country. The accents were considered funny. Dix points became a catchphrase; nul points a term for everyone from Norway or sometimes Dublin 4. Eurovision's capacity for cliche hit Ireland at just the right time. It entered the Irish psyche at the height of the era of post-Colonial Man and Ireland rode its way to victory on that syndrome's back.
Years before, Somerville and Ross had identified a sinuous ability in the native Irish character to second-guess its masters, leading to regular triumphs by natives in books such as The Irish RM and characters like Flurry Knox. With Eurovision, Flurry Knox came of age. Faced with the challenge of conquering Europe - and in the absence of a native pop culture - Ireland successfully second-guessed its way to seven victories.
Back then, it had some nobility. Born of the European Broadcasting Union via the San Remo Song Contest, it was a feast of communications technology and live broadcasting skill. While RTE technicians were first hooking their systems up to the continent, people outside Dublin still had to phone their local operator for a long-distance line; communication systems with people outside Ireland continued to await the universal direct dial. The dream of Europe lay before it, promising better trade, better resources and better relationships.
For three scarce hours each year, Italians, Irish, Maltese, Dutch, Greeks and Turks could play together, bound by mutual ties of television and popular culture. Not now. The stronger political union became, the weaker the Eurovision link. Global communications, the Internet and the imperial advances of satellite television left Eurovision's founding principles floundering to find any relevance at all.
Outwitted by other technology, by people and by the multiplicity of what were now called entertainment products, it fell into severe disrepair. Only its idiosyncratic voting system continues to have appeal.
It could have been different. For a brief moment when Dana International won for Israel while singing in drag, Eurovision glimp sed a vision of its possible self as a surfer of irony and parody giving everyone a good laugh or at least an admiring smile. The moment of Riverdance, envisaged by Moya Doherty, Bill Whelan and Michael Flatley on behalf of RTE, might have spawned a contemporary European cabaret, built as much on the old beer halls of Berlin as any snug from Ennis to St Ives.
But rather than take a chance, its vision of what was or could have been held in common sank into mediocrity and undermined the pleasant politics of the dix or nul points.
If Eurovision gave television anything, it was the crassness of Eurotrash rather than the brilliance of European soccer. The Europe it imagined was not a better place. It was no place at all - other than a haven for bureaucrats and a hidey-hole for tired televisual imaginations. The pursuit of the douze points led to a handful of lasting songs, but it is now outstripped by better media and better, if inadequate, bonding systems.
Entertainment-wise, that 1950s dream of a world where everyone can push a button at the same time and watch the same images is on permanent pause. Boston would not tolerate it. The language of what it may mean to be a Eur opean sounds mind-numbingly dull and where it's not at. Someone needs to save this spectacle or euthanise it charitably and fast. It is, of course, easy to knock Eurovision. Let that not deter us from the task.
mruane@irish-times.ie