Just 70

Joan Bakewell
Friday May 21, 2004
The Guardian

Somehow I always end up watching it, the Eurovision Song Contest. Every year I see it coming and resolve to avoid it. I know it's the essence of naff, the music platitudinous and the presentation garish. But something about its kitschness draws me to it. Once there, I feel the snug pleasure of recognition confirming why I hate it. Except that I don't hate it any more. I see it as a time-warp record of how we are and how we might be, left over from a more innocent age. It has become part of television's own archaeology, the strata of different eras laid down, yielding to the knowing viewer its clues to shifting allegiances and loyalties.

And there it was on Saturday, the same jaded format, but now representing the new Europe, with 36 countries voting and their choices revealing new patterns. As usual there was the familiar political tit for tat: Germany voted for Turkey and Turkey for Germany; Cyprus voted for Greece, Greece for Cyprus. But what a line-up the eastern countries made against the puny presence of old Europe: France, Britain and Ireland got hardly a look in. What came striding through with the vigour of a new world were the former Balkan and Soviet states, all voting for each other. Who would have expected Serbia and Montenegro to be so popular? What solidarity, too, between Poland voting for Ukraine, Ukraine for Russia. At one moment the Russian presenter used a telling phrase, commending "our Slavic neighbours".

All this has little to do with the music. I was backing the Barbra Streisand-like sound of Cyprus's entry, which did quite well. But what carried the day was the all- dancing, leather-and-thongs show put on by Ukraine. You felt the wind gusting in from the steppes, Ghengis Khan leading the rout. My wobbly geography might have got this all wrong, but that just shows my blurry grasp of what eastern Europe is about. If it did nothing else, the Eurovision Song Contest tipped me off about a new individuality and thrust from the east that makes western Europe look insipid, like pale English floral prints in the Mediterranean blaze.

I first knew Europe as a wretched and pitiable place. Hitler's occupation had cowed once proud countries, leaving only brave, little Britain holding out against the mighty Hun. It's not hard, when that is your childhood, to believe that everything that matters revolved round us. It played to the self-regarding nature of childhood to assume that it was so. And it's a habit that has hung around too long in much of our political thinking.

Then there was the Europe of seasickness and passports, as we made our first postwar cross- channel visits. So locked were we into our immediate past, that the priority of a scholarship visit to Holland was the laying of a wreath at the Arnhem memorial. But Europe, we discovered, was a network of frontiers and controls. Guards woke us in the middle of the night as the train crossed from France to Switzerland. Later we woke to checked tableclothes and crisp rolls at a Swiss station.

Our pity for our damaged neighbours was more than compensated for by the discovery that they had strange ways and glorious culture. How odd, we thought, to eat meals out in the open; the sight of pavement tables got our Brownie Box cameras clicking. They ate exotic food, such as spaghetti and garlic; they ate at odd times, breaking with what I had imagined was the universal convention of high tea at 6 o'clock. As we travelled south I discovered something else: these were beautiful people, golden and lithe, comfortable with a natural sensuality missing from our chill northern selves. The tables began to turn and I came to realise that we weren't at the centre of all that was best. Far from it.

Now we are all Europeans. Hairdressers own homes in France, garage proprietors retire to villas in Spain. Leaflets for flats in the Algarve shower through my letterbox. The euro crosses frontiers, leaving us stumbling to convert back to sterling where we once juggled marks and francs. But who of my generation looks to the east? It has taken a tacky song contest to wake me up to the realities. They tell me the best place to buy property at the moment is Slovenia