10 things we learned from Israel’s Eurovision Song Contest
1) The UK is now so reviled we could put the Beatles on stage singing Love Me Do and still come last.
2) All I can say in Iceland’s defence is it’s dark there for most of the year.
3) Israel’s Borat lookie-likey Kobi Marimi was not better than Netta. His operatic dirge was universally loathed by every Israeli. I didn’t meet a waiter, taxi driver or cyber security project manager willing to stomach a second of it.
4) After 70 years of harrowing, heartbreaking bloodshed, perhaps, just perhaps, dancers with flags pinned on their backs and Madonna beseeching us to ‘Wake up’ might just be the catalyst for peace we need in the Middle East.
5) The rest of Europe (and Israel) pronounce it ‘Urovison. The ‘E’ is silent.
6) The Czech Republic’s chipper Friend of a Friend by Lake Malawi should’ve won. Clearly Lake has too many layers of friends, but his jolly act and lovely white teeth got the crowd whipping out their phone torches in a hurry.
7) It was lovely to see Jean Paul Gautier. He hasn’t changed a bit since Eurotrash.
8) Super-intense boy-girl act Zala Kralj and Gašper Šantl put the ‘love’ in Slovenia with three minutes of socially awkward staring. He’ll eventually dump her for someone less intense.
9) In Israel, it turns out, you can still call someone a mentalist. Lior Suchard, a good Uri Geller, was introduced as such before baffling the worldwide TV audience of 200 million with mental mentalism.
10) Bad news for Dutch winner Duncan Laurence (whose chief sphere of influence is early Howard Jones). Consistent Ken Loach may already have launched a BDS movement against next year’s songfest in the Netherlands in protest over the country’s historic rampant colonialism (Boycott Dutch Songfest).
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