Tim: Tom, I’m not linking here to the official Eurovision channel, because I don’t want to tell you immediately what country this is. Instead, I want you to tell me roughly how many seconds passed before you guessed.
Tom: It actually took me until the vocals kicked in; I briefly thought it’d be Ireland from that intro instrumentation. And then, yes, it went very Spanish.
Tim: Very, very Spanish. So, I have multiple Eurovision history books, because of course I do, I’m me, and I can tell you that the idea for a Europe-wide contest came from a Swiss TV exec, Marcel Bezençon, who had two ideas. The first, a generic ‘talent show’ was rejected, which is probably a good thing as it would likely have ended up with ABBA sawing each other in half and Brotherhood of Man bringing us dancing dogs. The second was not rejected, as you can probably guess, and its original brief was ‘to promote high-quality original songwriting in the field of popular music’. 64 years later, we have this: Spain being as absolutely bloody Spanish as they possibly can, with a song that is entirely reminiscent of the fabulous piss-take that a Norwegian guy did a few years back, but played straight.
Tom: Those handclaps in the middle eight! I fully expected, just before the final chorus kicked in, someone to yell “¡Ay, caramba!” in the background.
Tim: And I love it. It’s ridiculous, it’s nonsensical, it’s atrocious, and it’s brilliant.
Tom: And it’s not going to win, but everyone involved will have a fantastic time.