How Millenials ruined Eurovision

Leman Walters

Venerable hack Giles Coren said on a podcast not too long ago that one of the main reasons for the decline in restaurant criticism is that “restaurants nowadays are basically great.” Long-gone is the era in which A. A. Gill (RIP) and Michael Winner (RIP) would descend on some rickety bistro and issue forth a rejoinder on the Lobster Bisque so withering as to prompt the maître d’ to fellate a shotgun barrel the moment the copy landed off the press the next morning. A truly sh*t, dreadful experience when dining-out is something that has to be largely sought nowadays, rather than braced-for, to the extent that a knowing sh*ttiness exists as a marketing-pull for the ironically-minded. Wong-Kei in Chinatown is reduced to a simulacrum of the actually-existing rude-and-shooddy-ness that defined it in the 1990s, despite its contemporary reputation still leaning on that schtick. More egregiously down the line is ‘Karen’s Diner,’ mercifully closed in the UK as of last-year, which adopted a fairly dated anti-honky meme from Black Twitter into a defining gimmick. Ho Ho Ho! I’m being given bad service! On purpose! (Kill yourself).

Such is the Le Epic Late-Stage Consumerist society that we live in that such things even propagate, loathe as I am to do Who Remembers Proper Crap Things as a line. Yet there is at least a kernel of truth. Millennials (especially the older ones) love Irony. Permit me the leap, but what applies to restaurant criticism as a trend also applies to pop music, the Eurovision Song Contest in particular. Eurovision used to be sh*t. It used to be full-throatedly, genuinely sh*t. Enduring it with my dear old dad during my youth was not an act of nudge-nudge-wink-wink appreciation for the knowingly kitsch, but an act of joyous sadism. Witnessing Tomaz Pierogi from Syldavia obliviously croon his way through ‘Bing Bong Boing’ was something to be laughed AT and not WITH. It was given added frisson by the fact that the UK was never ever going to win, even in the event that we were to submit a half-decent tune, as to quote the old man, “everyone f*cking hates us (roar)”. Scooch’s performance in 2007 doesn’t even feel like it belongs in the 21st Century, an abominable piece of bubblegum pap better left languishing in the early 90s. Daz Sampson’s attempt at a jack-the-lad rap tribute to Top Of The Pops Savile-ism the previous year was seriously pitched as approaching Cool. And in 2010 Poor Josh Dubovie was persuaded last-minute by Pete Waterman (presumably at gunpoint) to finish his offensively pedestrian oontz-oontz-lite ditty at a pitch he couldn’t possibly hope to hit, and it ended up being not much of a surprise when he crashed into last place.

A thorough itemisation of the dreadful Eurovision offerings domestic or otherwise would be a long-form listicle in and of itself, but it must be communicated as to how much the tone of this stuff was not explicitly knowing in intent. Bear witness to Albania’s 2012 offer, in which anime vampire Rona Nishliu caterwauls with such po-faced aplomb as to be unintentionally disturbing and amusing in equal measure, as one example of many. And even the acts that deliberately courted a sense of levity were cut from the same essentially earnest cloth- we all love Epic Sax Guy, but for Moldova’s SunStroke Project he was just Sax Guy, and camp flair aside his memeification was a latter Reddit-led phenomenon. Camp is not the same as Ironic Knowing. Verka Serduchka gave a tremendously shlocky performance in 2007, but it was far more Danny La Rue than Ru Paul, all full-throated spectacle and not so much constantly checking over the shoulder to make sure you ‘get the references, yeah.’ While the actual winners of the contest usually ended-up as at least Soberly Competent (with a few authentic bangers in there - Lena in 2010, anyone?), cocooned on sceptered Blighty the event to me was, in essence, just a load of bollocks.

This was the mood that had set much of the domestic coverage throughout the 2000s, a weary tone of “oh here we go” as Wogan squished into his tuxedo for another broadcasting adventure in national humiliation. Admitting any genuine enthusiasm for the contest among friends or normal people marked you in the same way you might be after admitting some odd hobby or habit, like collecting porcelain dolls, feeling sexual attraction to garden gnomes etc. A friend of my dad’s actually went out there to see it once, and was considered a “wrong-un” for doing so. Eurovision was not remotely an ‘event’ at school in the same way an X Factor Final was, and anyone older who was in the faintest sense ‘cool’ did not acknowledge it. Perhaps this was different in the more robustly middle-class echelons across the country, but I like to imagine that on the whole, those even aware accorded it the status of a hatewatch. I have old parents, and the reason I watched at all was probably an imparted vestigial notion from the 1980s that it was somehow a bulwark against imminent nuclear holocaust or whatever.

However, from about the mid-2010s (the maturing salad days of the Millenial), things had begun to change. I confess I was paying less attention by this point (our entry by Electro Velvet in 2015 nearly unironically killed me off, a tune that somehow managed to blacken the name of electro-swing even darker), but then I only had to dip-in to pick up on the shift in tone. I am skeptical that any young group of people before 2017 hosted a “Eurovision Watch Party,” and indeed for a while I was convinced such had been invented wholesale post-Brexit by a strike team from the IPPR commanded by Sunder Katwala, yet there my contemporaries were. Constructing gin vats. Doing witty banter on socials. Rating performances with genuine aplomb, and so on. The contest was enjoying an apparently newfangled popularity among the Buzzfeed classes. I caveat this already highly-generalist theory with the observation that there were still plenty, a majority even, of basically pedestrian tunes being offered, increasingly in tasteful Mumford And Sons-mode, which were fine. And yet in terms of the heartfelt sh*ttiness that hitherto had been the core characteristic of the stand-out acts, a mutation had occurred, along dual lines.

I will touch on the first less-interesting one briefly, which isn’t to do with the Millennial weakness for irony, but rather Big Queer and its encroachment on the contest and pop-culture more broadly. Now, oxymoronic as this sentiment might appear, Eurovision wasn’t always *quite* so gay, or so prefigured around ‘empowerment’ as a theme. Conchita Wurst in 2014 represented something of an amping-up in this regard - decent tune, bloke with a beard, upset the Borat-coded viewing nations yep brill. By the end of 2010s Eurovision was going the way of Dr Who in terms of its core fanbase presenting as well-gay, and the contest being billed as capital-f Fabulous. During the initial RTD-revival of Who of course I recall an equal split within the fanbase between those who were bullied because they knew who Isambard Brunel was and those bullied for knowing the lyrics to ‘Defying Gravity’ - this dynamic is now far more dominated by the gender people. Such is the story for dozens of other ‘fandoms,’ ‘spaces,’ etc., with Eurovision being a not immediately-appreciable example. This should not read as a straight (lol) criticism, indeed there’s a whole history to be written on this phenomenon, but it did mean a switch-up in tone from ‘Haha Look At That Bloke’s Gay Haircut’ to ‘Really Quite Important, Actually.’ It wasn’t sh*t anymore, it bloody well meant something.

The key way in which Eurovision is no longer sh*t however, or at least sh*t in a different way, is the insidious note of self-awareness permeating through the wackier acts. The appetite for kitsch-remix defines Millennial tastes, the apologism inherent to a generation that has only known decline in their adult lives. Stay with me on this. Take Daði og Gagnamagnið in 2021, an international sensation in its own right. The jumpers, the awkward keyboard-ring, the deliberately twee choreography. This isn’t sh*t. It’s wearing sh*t’s clothes and attempting to trick you into recalling when you hate-enjoyed something actually sh*t, transubstantiation through irony. Windows95man in 2024 was an absolute howler of an example of this, a performance that with its measured attention-seeking recalls a below-average insta reels comedian riffing on the quirks of MSN messenger. Every ‘weird’ moment curated specifically as a wink to the audience. This is not what the contest was about. A colleague was recently singing the praises of Europapa from a couple of years ago, and asked me if I thought it was “good.” “No,” I said. “It’s not good. It’s trying to be a bit rubbish on purpose.” This isn’t Lordi (2006). It’s not Milan Stanković (2010). It’s not even LT United (2006 again). I note that it is mainly the Scandinavian countries that are leading the charge in this trend but Croatia in 2023 stood out. Look into their eyes in this performance. They know what they’re doing, how this will play, they don’t think it’s ‘good’ but because it’s ‘bad’ it’ll work. At home, the gin cascades out the vat and a cry of “oh that was just really out there wasn’t it haha” goes up. We even had go at this year, but in true GB Eurovision tradition still managed to massively f*ck it up and come last (roar).

I think this is a sad development. But perhaps it’s moot to care about in any broader sense. The winner this year was actually quite good, and the sh*tiness of the entries I’ve put in defence really only owe their schticks to the gaucheness that defined the pop culture of the long 2000s - and times have simply changed. Nonetheless I long to tune in next year and see a Bulgaria 2009, something unapologetically garish, where I’m not invited to laugh but am doing so in spite of the artist’s intentions. Let me be a proper b*stard Eurovision, it’s the reason I watched at all.