The Return of Eurovision

Some traditions are important, so it's time for me to write a Eurovision blog post once again. It's no more than this year's competition deserves, as it returned with a bang, with all the right ingredients and some of the wrong ones. Colourful, eccentric, over-the-top numbers? All present and correct. The Force was strong with this one.

Did the right song win? Nah, but it could have been worse. I didn't think Italy's rock number was very memorable, but it wasn't bad either, and it's nice when one of The Big Five actually makes it to the top. Besides, I didn't really have a clear favourite this year. I liked our neighbours - the Norwegian guy had an appealing singing voice and a touching back story, and the stage show, though awkward, actually had a good excuse to use angel-demon imagery (unlike Cyprus, see below). As rock songs go, I preferred Finland's to Italy's, maybe because it was called "Dark side" (as Yoda said, always two there are - no wait, six?). And I enjoyed the Greek uptempo climbing of invisible stairs, though I can't remember the tune now, and France's ballad. But I can't really say that any song was clearly robbed of victory.

Here are some of numbers that stood out, sometimes for all the wrong reasons:

Black Sabbath of the year: Cyprus.  Not as in the rock group, of which I know nothing, but as in... an actual black sabbath. Annoyingly, the tune was just the kind of Eurovision melody I like: mainstream, upbeat and hummable. But what is the girl singing? OK, maybe she's just fallen for a Mexican bandit with a sinister nickname, or it's all metaphorical or something. But with that stage show - I dunno. We need those church bells from the Walpurgis Night segment in Fantasia, and we need them now.

"Well, this worked before" of the year 1: Russia. Netta from Israel won 2018 with a kooky feminist number, so here's this year's kooky feminist number - from Russia. Um, props to Manizha for being chosen to participate against the odds, I guess, but this really isn't my cup of tea. In fact, I had to mute the TV (because of the singer's voice, not because of the lyrics). Bring back Sergey!

"Well, this worked before" of the year 2: Ukraine. Back in 2016, Ukraine won with a song that had a scream in it. In the same vein, this year's Ukrainian singer had the competition's second muteable voice. Is it really supposed to be so grating? If that's the traditional take, then sorry, I prefer the decadent, westernised numbers of the past, like "Shady Lady" (that was Ukraine, right?). Nice flute, though.

"Get lost dude" song of the year: Malta. Like other songs about robustly turning down a guy's advances, this one was not a little cocky: "I'm too good to be true, but there's nothing in it for you" - oh, OK. Luckily, Malta's Destiny had the voice and verve to carry it off and come across like a girl delighted over having found the confidence to do what she likes rather than an arrogant bitch. But I still feel a bit sorry for the bloke. 

Strip club numbers of the year: Serbia and Azerbaijan. I have to mention Azerbaijan here, as the song is (supposedly) about a precursor to modern-day strippers, femme fatale Mata Hari. (Nice to see World War One German spies get some love.) The number itself was oriental pop - that is "oriental" as imagined in, say, an American mini-series featuring Omar Sharif as a sheik. Surely this was the girl who sang about Cleopatra in the non-competition last year, to a very similar beat? I actually got more strip club vibes from the trio from Serbia, though: their song was mostly something to wriggle along to in daring dresses. Something for the bored boyfriends in the audience, I suppose.

Totally irrelevant question of the year inspired by: Iceland. Nerdily charming, though if we're talking quirky I think I slightly preferred Lithuania. But how in the world can the fresh-faced lead singer in Iceland's band have been married for ten years? How old were he and his wife when they tied the knot, sixteen?

Positive national stereotype of the year: France. The only other Big Five song that did well apart from Italy, and deservedly so. A French chanson so typical it is almost too much - except a French chanteuse can never be too much, not even when crooning "Voilà" over and over. That's right, belle France, this is what we like to see - forget all those hip bands that are supposed to appeal to youths (but don't get their votes). Encore!

Oh, and thank you, Rotterdam, for a fantastic show.

Rogues vs villains

All right, so this is a bit of a cheat. I haven't written about Victorian fiction in simply ages (although surely adaptations and not-really-adaptations somehow count?), and then when I finally get round to reading a story by one of my favourite Victorian novelists it's not even a full-length novel, but a novella of 125 pages. Still, I'm sure I can find something to say about it.

The novella in question is A Rogue's Life, by the - almost - always readable Wilkie Collins. It is really enjoyable after a somewhat irritating start - I'll get back to that - but it made me ponder why I don't feel the same degree of warmth towards rogues as I do towards villains.

I think it's fair to say that the words rogue and villain aren't entirely the same, but can I really claim that there's that much of a difference? "Villain" shows up as an alternative when you search for synonyms for "rogue", and they have other synonyms such as "rascal" and "scoundrel" in common. Isn't rogue essentially a sub-category of villain? Maybe, but in that case it's a sub-category I have problems with. What I appreciate in a villain, apart from brains, is drive and strength of will. Rogues, like villains, act selfishly and immorally, but they also tend to be lazy. They don't expect to have to make an effort to achieve their goal: they want success to be handed to them on a plate. Fiyero's song "Dancing Through Life" ("life is fraughtless, when you're thoughtless") from Wicked comes to mind when I try to pinpoint a rogue's outlook. Now, there are loveable rogues to be sure, mostly of the mildly criminal but humorous kind. But to my mind, it's hard for a fictional character to pull off the blithe and laid-back opportunism of a rogue without becoming annoying.

Frank Softly, the protagonist of A Rogue's Life, is a case in point. When he is revealed to have made money out of drawing caricatures, his father (a hard-working doctor, a profession Frank has tried but detests) orders him to stop for the sake of the family honour: "I answered dutifully that I was quite ready to obey, on the condition that he should reimburse me by a treble allowance [...] or that Lady Malkinshaw should confer upon me the appointment of physician-in-waiting on her, with a handsome salary attached". Frank's father refuses his "extremely moderate stipulations". There is more in the same self-congratulatory vein. When Frank later tries his hand at portrait painting, he finds it quite beyond him to paint a flattering portrait of his brother-in-law Mr Batterbury (who's hilarious: Collins can be relied on to make the most of his side characters). He follows up the painting with a self-portrait, "making my own likeness quite a pleasant relief to the ugliness of my brother-in-law's". To sum up, far from finding Frank charming, I found him smug and conceited, and didn't particularly wish him well. With rogueishness so often comes a kind of "aren't I a bad lad" preening which can be hard to bear.

The story improves immensely, however, when Frank becomes embroiled in the mysterious doings of the father of a girl with whom he has fallen in love. For one thing, Frank's feelings for the fair Alicia are genuine: for a rogue, he is remarkably steadfast in the relationship department. More importantly, however, the plot becomes thrilling enough for the reader to better put up with its protagonist. It's a page-turning adventure story full of chases, near-escapes and cunning strategies in order to avoid the law. The narrative is wrapped up rather hastily, but for the latter part of the novella I was hooked.

The story also contains one of those neat legal conceits that you often find in Collins: the reason Mr Batterbury is concerned for Frank's welfare at all is that Frank's scornful sister Arabella will be left a legacy of three thousand pounds, providing Frank outlives the aforementioned Lady Malkinshaw, his marvellously robust grandmother. It's an amusing situation, though not quite as amusing as Frank finds it. I was firmly Team Batterbury here: no-one can say he doesn't put some solid work into getting that legacy (I'll not reveal whether he's successful).

A Rogue's Life is a good read. But if you're looking for a loveable rogue, I don't think that you'll find him here.    

Am I not geeky enough for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - or too geeky?

One thing audiobooks can be good for is when you want to try out those famous books you've always thought you ought to read but haven't really felt like buying. I know that this function should be filled by library books, but I'm not a very tidy reader (and often read while I'm eating) and library books make me nervous. Audiobooks could be the answer.

True, I still haven't put this pretty theory into practice that much, but one I-really-ought-to-read-this book, or rather set of books, I have started listening to: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The title usually refers to a series of sci-fi novels chronicling the adventures of hapless human Arthur Dent after Earth is blown up in book one (which is the one actually called The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). I've suspected that this book series ought to be up my alley for quite some time. Douglas Adams worked as a script editor on Doctor Who back in the Classic era and penned some adventures himself, and the Hitchhiker's Guide books sounded like a cross between Doctor Who and P.G. Wodehouse - geeky concepts meet witty comedy. Some of my favourite things, then.

So, by now I've listened to the two first novels in the series, and started on number three and - well. It's not that they're not entertaining. They're funny and an easy listen. But I confess I feel a little disappointed. Seeing as this is the Great Text of Geekdom, I expected more.

Perhaps great expectations are part of the problem. Way back, I read a Donald Duck comic, clearly modelled on Adams's books, where Donald had to hitch through the galaxy. He ended up on all sorts of colourful alien worlds, and I remember finding the story a delight. This was the kind of thing I thought the originals would explore too. But a goodish stretch into book one, Arthur hasn't come farther than a spaceship comparatively close to Earth (or where Earth used to be before the spaceship blew it up). Then he is saved from certain death by another spaceship. Lastly, he ends up on a planet where other planets are manufactured, and that's the only alien civilisation he properly gets to in the first book. One of these manufactured worlds was Earth, which turns out to have been a vast computer controlled by interdimensional beings (undercover as white mice) trying to find out the right question to ask concerning life, the Universe and everything (they already know the answer - 42).

Whether The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is for you depends, I'd say, on your reaction to the previous sentence. If you think "what absolute drivel", Hitchhiker's Guide is not for you. If you think "wow, that sounds really inventive and funny", it definitely is. I'm somewhere inbetween. Most of the scenarios Adams dreams up, while enjoyably outlandish, seem to exist mainly as the set-up for jokes. The encounter with alien worlds doesn't create any real sense of wonder. They're mostly there so the author can gently - or sometimes not-so-gently - make fun of phenomena familiar to us Earthlings. A lot of the satire could have worked equally well if the stories were set in a London suburb. 

This is where being too geeky comes in. A few years ago I'd never even heard of "world building", and as I'm not generally one for local colour in books - stop describing smelly slums or magnificent vistas of nature and get on with the story! - I didn't think it meant a lot to me. But I'm actually missing the "world building" component, which is usually an important part of sci-fi, in the Hitchhiker's Guide books. I was expecting them to seek out new life and new civilisations in true Star Trek style (only funnier), but there hasn't been much of that so far.

Let's face it, though - the main reason I'm not as sucked into the Hitchhiker's Guide saga as I thought I would be is probably that I'm not geeky enough. When you don't find jokes as funny as is clearly intended, you usually don't imagine your sense of humour to be at fault, but rather the jokes. Leastways, that's how it is for me. Some of Adams's skits don't land for me at all. The whole subplot (in the second novel) where a third of a planet's population with "useless" jobs are suckered into leaving their home, and then make a very poor show of colonising another world, I found vaguely insulting. With that kind of outlook, where does Adams suppose authors fit in? The more utilitarian the society, the higher the suspicion tends to be towards the Arts - a society without hairdressers could easily also be one without storytellers.

Mostly, however, I do find the jokes funny, but think that they are hammered home too incessantly. There are a lot of conversations were someone says something quirky, and then someone else (usually Arthur) indignantly asks "What do you mean [repeats quirky phrase]?" It sometimes takes ages for Arthur's friend Ford Prefect, an alien in disguise who saves him when Earth is doomed, to get a point across to the dense Arthur, which becomes wearying. I find myself longing for Ford to explain clearly from the beginning and for Arthur simply to accept the mind-bending concepts thrown at him. There are also a lot of whimsical asides about how certain things were invented, the thoughts of a sperm whale accidentally  created in space etc. Meanwhile the plot meanders and the characters, while amiable, aren't really fleshed out. The flamboyant Zaphod Beeblebrox (I'm relying on IMDB's spelling here) is the only one who can be called colourful.

But almost all of my gripes could boil down to me not being on the right geeky wavelength. Probably, I should stop complaining about plotlessness and embrace the quirkiness and the whimsy. That I'm not quite able to do that (while, as I said, having a good enough time with these audiobooks) may be proof that, Doctor Who and Star Wars interests notwithstanding, I'm really a square.    

Which wouldn't come as a surprise to Adams. In the Hitchhiker's Guide universe I, as someone working (broadly speaking) within the civil service, most closely resemble the unspeakable Vogons - mean-spirited, venal creatures who write absolutely appalling poetry. And I'm fine with that.