(Click here for a more direct route to the nonsense...)
We don't know if we're finally at the maximum saturation point and we've seen enough of this old rot, or we're just a pair of grumpy old sods, but this year's Una Voce Per San Marino has been a bit of a slog. Hardly anything is either really good or really bad, instead it's all at slopping about at the low end of mediocre… it's like watching an everlasting local village hall version of Nobody's Got Talent, only with lashings more blandness. For the most part you know what you're about to get before they even walk up the steps after their awkward chat with a hostess who still hasn't worked out how microphones work. And there's a few rules of thumb to apply before the first pitchy squawks come out of each of their mouths.
If they've got two dancers, it's going to be a knuckle-gnawingly ordinary weak dance song. If they're wearing either a hat, a waistcoat or a white shirt, they're going to think they're a proper musician - and any combination of the three just magnifies their drear. If they're in a dress that goes down to the floor it's going to be a ballad so unmemorable that you'll think you've had a petit mal, if they're got fluro trousers on they're going to be a bit 'look how mad I am! Can you see?!!', and if they're holding some kind of an instrument, then just pop to the corner shop for some milk like you've been meaning to all day. If you don't, you'll wish you had.
Night after night of this endless parade of usual I've had good honest people sending me links saying "Come on, surely this one?!", and click the url excitedly, only to be met with a bunch of clodhoppers stamping listlessly about wearing what they think pop stars dress like, but that they actual found in the deeper recesses of Shein. Five nights in and the only song I'd managed to get through from start to end was a bunch of Luxembourgers singing hopefully about San Marino - and that was mainly to see if the singer ever took her comedy hat off. But then came this…
Witness three apparent Hungarians in their late youth, counting their steps and desperately trying to remember a lyric that appears to be about mucking about with farm animals. Marvel as they self-consciously loon about, trying to be wacky - but that's wacky with as many sets of inverted commas as you can muster around it. But then get a little confused, because somehow there seems to be a smidgeon of art behind all this try-hard cobblers. And you've got to grudgingly admire a song that contains the line "Come get your hooves out". To use a much used Apocalypse analogy, it's like a car accident or a bad wig - you know it's bloody awful, but you just can't stop looking at it.
Or was it just because everything else so far in this tournament has been so bloody poor that this most amateurish of performances appeared entertaining…
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