Eurovision

I remember being somewhat into the Eurovision Song Contest for a while in my teens. Love Shine A Light (the 1997 winning song from the UK) was played on Austrian radio for ages, and I was fourteen at the time. In 2000, I distinctly remember watching the event with the TV muted and the radio tuned in to a sarcy commentary show that was just making fun of everything. It already seemed like a crazy over-the-top show back then, though the winning song that year, Fly On The Wings Of Love, was just two middle-aged Danish dudes playing their guitars.

The next time I remember paying attention to the event wasn't until 2014, when I had just started my job at my current employer, and Austria won the competition with a drag queen performing what sounded like a song straight out of a James Bond movie. Being the only Austrian in the office, I was naturally congratulated on "my" victory. When I looked up the song to know what everyone was talking about, I was mostly baffled. 

Fast forward to this year... and of course someone pinged me again around midnight to tell me that "I" had won. I was briefly confused when I checked the BBC website and it stated that Switzerland had taken the crown, though this was corrected minutes later. Didn't expect the BBC of all places to be unable to keep its small central European countries in a row!

Screenshot as proof that I'm not slandering the BBC over nothing

Once the situation had been clarified, I looked up this year's winning entry... and once again, "we" seem to have won by a mix of being both passionate and sincerely weird. The bit where the singer suddenly switches to an extremely high pitch nearly had me jump out of my chair, followed by actual laughter when the whole thing transitions into a fast techno beat all of a sudden. Never change, Eurovision.