Cinco....El Meikinmoni

Well that’s over for another year. Taking advantage of the new RTVE web page that I wrote about the other day I’ve finally been able to catch up on Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. Rodolfo Chikilicuatre may not have captured many points, but the domestic marketing surrounding the Spanish entry certainly paid off with over 14 million viewers tuning in to watch the show in Spain. For the company behind it all, that’s not bad going for something that just began as a joke spin off from the Buenafuente comedy series. That background noise you hear is the sound of cash tills. Hopefully we’ll now get a bit of a rest from Chiki fever but with the summer coming up that’s probably doubtful.

The Spanish interpretations of why Europe failed to fall at the feet of Chikilicuatre have been quite interesting. The most common conclusion seems to be that Europe simply has no sense of humour, as if carrying a tiny plastic guitar and having one of your dancers fall over was a landmark in comic invention. Then there is always the effect of “los del Este”, a generic term coined by a previous Spanish loser which seems to include almost every country between Germany and the Pacific, bounded by Finland in the north and Turkey to the south.

It became fairly clear that this might not be the year for those who don’t take the competition seriously when Ireland’s Dustin the Turkey failed to take flight at the semi-final stage. However, the Bosnian entry was much more strange and “friki” than Chikilicuatre’s effort, and did quite well; although being an ex Yugoslav republic does seem to help slightly when the votes are being handed out. I'm off to the UK for a week, where the celebrations over Eurovision ended before they started; I don't expect to experience much build up for the European Championship either.