EUROVISION: The State of the Continent
Romania sang about strangulation. The UK apologised for existing. Five countries boycotted a song contest on 'genocide' grounds. Croatia dissed Ottoman rule. I score the Eurovision Song Contest.
There is a basic morality litmus test I’ve played with my children for years. It’s called ‘God or Devil’. No rules, no caveats, simply assign everything its proper place. Sun? God. Chocolate? God. Wine? You may disagree, but I’m going with God. Heroin? Devil. Spiders? Bring on the debate.
Eurovision, like so much of modern life, is now completely unrecognisable from the one I grew up watching. I’m not claiming there was some lost golden age of high brow musical distinction. It was always a gloriously sub-par carousel of regionally influenced pop songs, the leaderboard shuffled by political regional allegiances.
But genuine gems did emerge, like Abba’s Waterloo in 1974, or the 1958 Italian entry Volaré, which only placed third but went on to be immortalised by Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.
However, the good-natured cheesey pop wouldn’t have triggered the ‘Devil’ response until quite recently.
I watched in 2024 specifically to support the Israeli entry, amid the escalating media furore over whether Israel should be permitted to participate at all. Irish entry Bambie Thug (they/them and fae/faer pronouns) delivered a horror film-adjacent screeching performance daubed in pro-Palestine messages sneakily written in Irish Ogham script.
I’m not suggesting that people who support Palestine are necessarily on the Devil’s side, but Bambie Thug’s lyrics speak for themselves:
“Avada Kedavra, I speak to destroy
The feelings I have I cannot avoid
Through twisted tongues a hex deployed on you
That all the pretties in your bed escape your hands and make you sad
And all the things you wish you had, you lose”
Avada Kedavra is one of the killing curses in Harry Potter.
I scored it nul points and Devil. Eden Golan’s Hurricane, the Israeli entry, was beautifully sung and genuinely moving and she wasn’t dressed like one of Satan’s minions. It scored douze points and God in this household.
In 2026, I watched to support my friend’s daughter, Antigoni, representing Cyprus. She didn’t win, although she turned in a great performance of a song. But I’m no longer sure that ‘great performance’ is the qualifying criterion.
And here is where this Substack becomes one of those what on earth has happened to us pieces. Bear with me.
Romania’s entry was called “Choke Me”, glamourising strangulation, which has migrated from the darker corners of online pornography into mainstream sexual practice with depressing speed. Roughly half of sexually active young adults now report having tried it and around a quarter of reported sexual assaults involve strangulation. (Kids, sex never used to be this way.)
The Romanian group was dressed accordingly — somewhere between an underground fetish night and a very committed Halloween party.
They were not alone. Several entrants appeared to have come direct from the kind of gathering that requires a password, a very particular dress code and a live animal sacrifice. God or Devil? You know the answer.
When performers weren’t dressed for Satanic ritual or BDSM clubs, quite a few were simply overweight. As were a number of the national presenters. I say this not to pick on or ‘body shame’ individuals but as a commentary on Western public health. Something has softened and become unhealthy in the collective physique, as much as the psyche. We have, culturally speaking, let ourselves go.
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And now I will sound rather old, but do you remember when men looked like men and women looked like women? The manicured and made up men entrants were not pictures of masculinity. Soft around the edges, I wondered whether they were pre-emptively administered oestrogen in the green room, like geese prepared for foie gras?
The BBC presented the UK’s segment via a drag queen. The BBC is inexplicably obsessed with drag queens. The UK entry itself was a pink boiler-suited manifesto of performative self-loathing, its singer stomping about to a synth-pop complaint about how tedious Britain is, sung partly in German for maximum signalling:
“Countin’ in English doesn’t cut the mustard
So sick of munching roly-poly with custard
I’m so bored with it, bored with it
Oh, what’s the point of it, point of it? (oh ja, ja, ja)
I’ve always been a fan of aviation
I’m jumpin’ on a plane to another nation
All my pounds, they feel counterfeit
I need some euros to count on it”
Britain has been on the Eurovision naughty step since Brexit but this particular act of self-flagellation was never going to cut the Dijon mustard either.
The political dimension has transmogrified into something genuinely sinister. Five countries boycotted this year’s contest in Vienna over Israel’s participation. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez released a solemn video explaining that Spain could not, in good conscience, participate in a song contest while Israel remained eligible — citing the same principles the EBU applied to Russia after Ukraine. Except Spanish athletes competed in the World Athletics Championships, where Israel also participated, without anyone in Madrid experiencing a crisis of conscience.
My friend’s daughter Antigoni was, I suspect, simply too pretty, too feminine, too straightforwardly positive about her own country. Cyprus and Moldova were the rare entries that still seemed to like themselves. Wrong energy entirely. Next year, she might consider arriving in sackcloth, donning devil horns, performing a live invocation to Hecate, and releasing a single about how much she despises Cyprus. That should get the televote moving.
The honourable exception was Croatia. Lelek’s “Andromeda” drew on its own history, with powerful female harmonies, old Slavic melodies and interestingly, visual motifs rooted in Croatia’s turbulent past. The female singers were adorned with ‘šicanje’, the traditional tattoos of Catholic Croats living under Ottoman rule, done partly to declare their faith, partly to prevent abduction and conversion to Islam. Apparently, this has caused considerable upset in Turkey, which tells you everything you need to know about who was doing something right. Croatia, I’m sorry I didn’t send you any points on the night, I didn’t know the fascinating back story, but you definitely win the ‘God’ score.
The thing is, Eurovision used to be a harmless mirror held up to Europe — a charming and sequin-framed reflection of who we were, or at least who we wanted to be on a cheesey Saturday night. What it reflects now is something rather different. We are fatter and less embarrassed about it. The distinctions between men and women — distinctions that most of human history considered beautiful — have been incrementally blurred. National pride has been rebranded as something to apologise for. Politics has curdled from the merely petty into something that deploys the language of genocide to justify acting like anti-semitic bullies. And I appear to have become Mary Whitehouse. Still, God, not Devil.
Eurovision now is like the last days of Caligula. The BBC'S obsession with drag queens put me off before I'd started but I did go online and vote for Israel as a matter of principle. I'm afraid Laura I feel you are too kind to people who support the Palestinian cause, particularly after the report published this week their moral compass is MIA.
I watched about 15 minutes. Andromeda was the last straw. It gave me the creeps. The whole thing seemed like a tribute to evil.