Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Ah, Ted, I've got Eurosong fever.

While brutally filleting my CD collection yesterday looking for things to file under "awful stuff, sell" (see yesterday's entry or just go straight to eBay and get bidding before telling all your friends and getting me lots of hits - hey, it's funnier than a guy in a dress, I promise) there were a few things that I could quite simply not part with despite being their pretty abysmal.

There was the Chipmunks album, for instance. There was also Sixty Shades of Green - The Non-Stop Irish Ceilidh Party Mix. Both of these were presents, and despite their marketable dreadfulness it would be a terrible insult to those who gave them to me to simply discard them in a job lot of tat. And anyway, I need to keep those in reserve in case of alien invasion - even if Slim Whitman doesn't do the trick like in Mars Attacks, this stuff will definitely cause their huge alien heads to explode.

The final disc I should have really thrown in the box but didn't was This Is Eurovision, a compilation of "classic" tracks from the Song Contest That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I just couldn't bring myself to ditch it. Sure, just about all the songs on there are pap. Most of them are cheesy. But they're all tributes to the utterly inexplicable longevity of the thing and the shamelessness of some of the artists involved, whether it's Cliff Richard or Bucks Fizz or, god help us, Celine Bloody Dion. Even in this world of cynicism, bloodshed and pain it's still good to hear that all these woes can be swept away by simply singing "Ding-a-dong".

It's the Eurovision Song Contest this Saturday. I can't wait. Having heard a few clips from the entries earlier (you can take a listen on the contest website as long as you're not using a Mac, a Linux box or anything else that doesn't have the latest version of Happy Proprietary Windows Media Player) I find myself agreeing with Terry Wogan that the UK's entry is pretty damn strong, but there's also the small matter of political voting and that whole Iraq thing. We shall see.