Nul Points Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Moore

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Nul Points

  22 April 1978 Palais des Congrès, Paris Jahn Teigen Norway Mil Etter Mil

  4 April 1981 Royal Dublin Society Finn Kalvik Norway Aldri i Livet

  24 April 1982 Harrogate Conference Centre Kojo Finland Nuku Pommiin

  23 April 1983 Rudi Sedlmayer Halle, Munich Çetin Alp Remedios Amaya Turkey Spain Opera ¿Quien maneja mi barca?

  9 May 1987 Palais de Centenaire, Brussels Seyyal Taner and Locomotif Turkey Şarkιm Sevgi Üstüne

  30 April 1988 Royal Dublin Society Wilfried Austria Lisa, Mona Lisa

  6 May 1989 Salle Lys Assia, Palais de Beaulieu, Lausanne Daníel Iceland Þa Sem Enginn Sér

  4 May 1991 Cinecittà Studio 15, Rome Thomas Forstner Austria Venedig im Regen

  30 April 1994 The Point, Dublin Ovidijus Vyšniauskas Lithuania Lopišine Mylimai

  3 May 1997 The Point, Dublin Tor Endresen Norway San Francisco

  3 May 1997 The Point, Dublin Celia Lawson Portugal Antes do Adeus

  9 May 1998 National Indoor Arena, Birmingham Gunvor Guggisberg Switzerland Lass’ Ihn

  24 May 2003 Skonto Olympic Arena, Riga Jemini United Kingdom Cry Baby

  21 May 2005 Palace of Sport, Kiev

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The spangled insanity, the stubborn reinforcement of crude national stereotypes, the scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship and hatred…throughout those long post-ABBA decades, the Eurovision Song Contest has been drawing 450 million of us to the sofa for all the wrong reasons. And the most gloriously wrong of all: our enduring fascination with the unfortunates left to wander the desolate summit of Mount Fiasco without a point to their names.

  From Lisbon to Liverpool, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Tim Moore travels the continent to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who suffered the entertainment world’s prime humiliation.

  About the Author

  Tim Moore’s writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times and Esquire. His books include French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go and Spanish Steps. He lives in West London with his wife and three children.

  Also by Tim Moore

  Frost on My Moustache

  Continental Drifter

  French Revolutions

  Do Not Pass Go

  Spanish Steps

  To Çetin Alp

  Nul Points

  ‘OUR NEXT SONG for Europe is performed by Jane Alexander,’ intones Terry Wogan, with a gentle reverence he won’t be deploying too often on finals night two months hence, ‘and it’s called Shame.’

  One walked out of the Blockbusters studio with three gold runs and an adventure break in North Wales under his belt, another was once asked out by Placido Domingo, a third competed with distinction as Sicily’s representative at the 1983 Italian Donkey Kong championships. But of all my friends’ most notable achievements, none is more impressive nor improbable than the feat whose perpetrator is now hunched and cringing on an adjacent sofa.

  The lazy, pitiless jeers that have cannoned around this south-London front room for the past half-hour fade to avid silence; three of us lean forward and Jane sinks back, watching through face-clasped fingers as her rather younger self manoeuvres a pair of spinnaker-sized red lapels through the side curtains.

  A Song For Europe is Eurovision’s school of hard knocks, and reliving its videotaped 1989 incarnation, my wife Birna and I, and Jane’s husband Chas, have been pulling no punches. Our hooted derision has seen off the snaggle-toothed puffball pixies and the hungover minicab controller; one especially vicious blast blew Jason Donovan’s cousin clean out of the ugly tree. And how we’ve thrilled to the period catwalk comedy that is such a treasured Eurovision rite: four acts in, the have-your-eye-out shoulder pads aren’t quite the mirth-magnet they were, but the back-combed, sprayed-up, cliff-fringed tonsorial splendour is still reliably reducing us to exhausted, whimpery croaks: ‘The hair … the hair.’

  Given what Terry’s introduced before, and most of what he’s going to introduce after, there seems no real justification for our hostess’s embarrassment, though I don’t imagine that jacket is too near the front of the current Alexander wardrobe. Jane quickly confirms what our eyes and ears have been telling us throughout years of friendship: she has a fantastic voice, and she looks great. For the next three minutes her performance thrills not only her front-room companions, but the fêted studio guest whose verdict Terry now requests.

  ‘I hope that sounded as good at home as it did here,’ enthuses Lulu, in breathy, eager Glaswegian lite. ‘That really is my favourite. Wasn’t she terrific!’

  The audience expresses its loud consent, Birna and I yelp ‘Boom-Bang-A-Bang!’ in ragged unison, and Jane finally lets her hands drop from her face.

  ‘Yeah, well, not that terrific,’ she murmurs, wryly, ‘or I’d have done better than third.’

  Oh, come on! This is Eurovision, or very nearly, an institution watched by half the world since telly began: you’ve played a part in the greatest show on earth! And how about that Lulu stuff? Lulu! A bona fide Eurovision legend, back in the days before we all started to … well, you know … like we just did … to, ah, everyone except you.

  ‘Um, thanks,’ says Jane.

  Drafted in at very short notice when Shame’s intended performer bottled it, A Song for Europe – the national qualifier held to select Britain’s Eurovision entry – gave Jane a free roll of the fame dice, after a vocal apprenticeship served out in clubs and bars. ‘You think: Well, this could be the big moment,’ she sighs, as Live Report stroll out to reprise their winning entry. ‘Sitting in our little dressing rooms I’m sure we all thought it. Look at these guys – they went off to the final and nearly won.’

  No shame in coming third to them, particularly when the well-stocked internet archives I find myself consulting the next morning reveal that with 47,664 televotes, Jane ended up just a couple of thousand shy of the puffball pixies who somehow finished second. But Eurovision wouldn’t be Eurovision without its sorry, hopeless losers, and as a child of the Wogan generation I can’t resist a gloating peek at the wrong end of the Song For Europe scoreboard: no shame in third, but perhaps – snigger – just a smidge in last.

  So there’s Danny Ellis, whose performance lured just one viewer to the phone for every twenty who dialled up in support of Live Report. Just for the Good Times, eh Danny? Whoops!

  I enlarge the muddy screenshot beside his score: it’s the minicab controller, focus of some of our lairier jeers. Suddenly it isn’t quite so funny. My unappealing smirk withers, like a bully’s at the inquest of his taunted victim. Eighth out eight; Danny’s dreams of stardom stillborn – from wannabe to never-was in three minutes. Viewed in guilty hindsight, there’s an earnest fragility in those pasty, nondescript features, a poignant, unschooled haplessness in that slightly bouffant centre parting and the night-out-at-Harvester jacket.

  If A Song for Europe was an unexpected opportunity for Jane, for Danny it must have seemed the biggest break since half of Beachy Head fell off. Out of the blue you’re offered a shot at the big-time, then live before the Saturday-night prime-time millions, you unload straight into your foot.

  It hardly bears thinking about, so of course for the rest of that day I do little else. I’m still doing it long after the online revelation of Danny’s happy ending: the Florida home shared with wife and daughter, the voice seminars and workshops, even the release of a recent album, albeit one that expresses his journey to joy through the teachings
of Prem Rawat. And I’m doing it because it’s just not possible to dwell on Eurovision misfortune without pondering the fate of those who finished not just last, but least, and whose reward was a flatly derisive soubriquet that has come to exemplify ignominious ineptitude. The gold standard of catastrophic failure, the benchmark of badness, it’s a catchphrase that sits alongside Waterloo, Bucks Fizz and that German girl on a stool with her big white guitar in our shared Eurovision memories, a catchphrase whose universality, as I swiftly discover, has now attracted the Oxford University Press lexicographers.

  nul points n. a score of zero in a contest; a verdict of abysmal quality. A facetious British usage inspired by the Eurovision Song Contest.

  Ah, that facetious British usage, and oh, its inspiration.

  Here, in the land that Katie Boyle first taught us to know as la Royaume Uni, we gave birth to the pop song, nurtured it to wise maturity. Pop was our gift to the world, and on a Saturday night each May, we’d settle smugly down on the sofa to watch our hapless continental brethren try and return the favour. At 8 p.m., Terry Wogan would welcome us with a complicit chuckle to Zagreb’s Vatroslav Lisinski Hall, or the Palais de Centenaire in Brussels, and an evening of unfailingly hilarious schadenfreude would unfold. We gave them toe-tappers, they gave us thigh-slappers. La, la, la, ding, dang, dong, ho, ho, ho.

  The Eurovision Song Contest entertained us in ways it was never supposed to: we tittered at its kitsch inanity, its stubborn reinforcement of the crudest national stereotypes, at a scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border amity and hatred. A ludicrous, lamé farce, three hours of Austrian power ballads, hand-jiving Latvians and Maltese electro-folk. A towering cathedral of cheese, constructed entirely without cheddar.

  What is it pride comes before? We found out on 24 May 2003, live from the Skonto Arena in Riga. Tackling our nation’s chosen song for Europe, chirpy Scouse duo Jemini launched into Cry Baby half an octave south of the backing track, then spent three agonising minutes failing to find their way back. Don McLean’s was not the last word on the subject – this was the day the music died.

  The incompetent delivery of awful songs had been luring us to the sofa for years. That yodelling, sequinned Hungarian; the Travolta-maned Turkish rasper in his tieless white three-piece, those bearded, whistling Danes: no ESC was complete without its daft, deluded musical martyrs, trampled in the stampede towards our continent’s lowest cultural dominator. But this … well, this was never supposed to happen.

  ‘Here are the results from the Icelandic jury,’ announced a shaky Nordic voice. No mention of la Royaume Uni in the faltering list that followed, nor from Austria, nor Ireland, nor Turkey. Terry Wogan’s chortling contempt rang dismally hollow for the rest of the evening; that British usage would, henceforth, be rather less facetious. Nul pwah, since student days in everyday use as a response to acts of slapstick clumsiness, was quietly dropped from my vocabulary.

  Eurovision was one of the rare international competitions the British had never entered as underdogs; I wasn’t quite sure how to recalibrate my scornometer. Watching a Frenchwoman totter around the 2004 stage in six-foot stilts, I understood that sober respect for the contest as a whole might, as the football fraternity would have it, be too big an ask. But the minimum requirement, surely, was humbled compassion for the scoreboard-proppers, those whose injury we had for years delighted in supplementing with insult. The old reflex had been there when I barked a jeer at the dunce in A Song For Europe’s class of ‘89, but its hooted follow-up had died in my throat and now, in a spirit of penance and forgiveness, I had done my bit towards the rehabilitation of Danny Ellis.

  And his, I now reminded myself, was a blow softened by 6,777 telephonic messages of support, a solace of sorts on that long journey to joy. But to win the national qualifier and get to the final, to jump with all your eager might on the gilded springboard to ABBA-land and feel it shatter, to have so far to fall with nothing to cushion your landing, to awake after the worst night of your life and find sympathy boiled down to poorly stifled sniggers in the hotel lobby … to max out at the Eurovision Song Contest is to find yourself atop the lonely, windswept summit of Mount Fiasco.

  Even the most disastrous humiliations of my life barely register on the nul points Richter scale. The mind alights reluctantly on the occasion I lavishly succumbed to sea-sickness while taking off my polo-neck in a cabin full of Norwegians; on my blared enquiry as I cheekily leafed through a female friend’s diary in front of a large group of associates: ‘So who’s this “P” you’ve been meeting every month, eh?’ And then there was the moment, in distant early childhood, when Mrs Hoyle forced a Breton fishermen’s jersey over my pudding-bowled head and shoved me out from the wings to stand in for her bed-bound protégée at the Silverdale Primary annual pageant. It is difficult even now to relive the centre-stage horrors I suffered thereafter, a half-dancing, half-singing study in blinking, craven, spotlit bewilderment as the chorus line behind rollocked their way through All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor. Thirty-five years on, the memories are still weighing my head down below the public-performance parapet. We’ve all cocked up at the karaoke, but who can conceive of the monumental indignities sustained by the nul-pointer who stands up to be counted by all the peoples of Europe, and then isn’t?

  These performers didn’t just walk on to that one stage and bomb; in appealing to each and every Eurovision jury they effectively entered two dozen separate contests around the continent, sang their little song, the repository of all their hopes and dreams, then had to sustain those brittle Eurosmiles as duck after duck after duck popped up on the giant scoreboard, a deck of portholes stretching along its busy superstructure. Did they like me in Germany? Nein. Latvia? Ne. Right across the continent, from Reykjavik to Riga, Lisbon to Limassol, they’d watched and listened, then yawned, cringed, guffawed. Heady excitement curdled into towering, grandiose humiliation, before a crowded auditorium and half a billion live viewers. All nudging each other with the same pitiless rhetorical query: how about that Norwegian pillock, eh?

  Well, now that I mention it: how about that Norwegian pillock? It’s a Saturday night in mid-adolescence, and I’m sprawled and smirking on the sofa, already enjoying Eurovision for all the wrong reasons. And here he comes, the majestic wrongest of all those wrongs, some straw-haired ninny in bad shades and braces, prancing his way to infamy. No one forgets their first nul-pointer.

  Though in doing so I’m dimly aware of slipping further into the realms of obsession, it doesn’t take long to put a name to that fuzzy, half-remembered face. Jahn Teigen, 1978, the nul points granddaddy, the reason Norway now has those two words branded across its buttocks. ‘Eurovision’s most notorious flop,’ begins the BBC’s brutally terse biography, ‘Teigen sang Mil Etter Mil while twanging his braces and kicking his legs.’ A small picture portrays a man in red trousers energetically thus engaged. ‘He went on to run Norway’s only private pub-brewery and a naturopathic pharmacy.’

  Now there’s a sentence you don’t just read once. Running widened eyes across it a third time, the Jemini-flavoured contrition with which I’d recalled my unedifying part in Jahn Teigen’s downfall is swept aside by a surge of more stirring sentiment. Yes, I was there when Jahn was thrown down the nul points mineshaft, cackling harshly as his screams faded to an echo; now, though, all these years later, I’m here again as in weary triumph he hauls himself out, this time awed to respectful silence by those heroic powers of recuperative reinvention. From pan-continental laughing stock to hippie publican, here was a survivor with an extraordinary tale to tell. Little red-trousered man on my monitor, I salute you.

  It’s only as I scroll down the page that whimsical curiosity hardens into excited, righteous, torso-tautening determination. For below Jahn’s entry is a roll-call of the nul points fallen, some names distantly resonant, others no more to me than unknown warrior-minstrels left face-down in the Eurovision no man’s land. Remedios Amaya, Tor Endresen, Seyyal Taner, Gunvor Guggisberg … on it goes
, from Jahn to Jemini, from Oslo to Istanbul, fourteen sacrificed reputations remembered on the entertainment world’s most luridly desecrated memorial. Fourteen hands to shake, fourteen stories to hear, fourteen shaming wrongs to right.

  So headily mesmeric is this fledgling vision that it’s hardly a surprise to encounter its mission statement twice in the course of a single evening’s telly-watching. I first hear Jeremy Clarkson employ those two evocative words during some lavish vehicular dismissal, and then, rather more divertingly, Doctor Who, taunting the Daleks as they fail to broach the Tardis forcefield: ‘Is that it? Useless! Nul pwah!’ And this from one who can draw his insults from right across the space-time continuum: as a pan-galactic benchmark of arrant, ignominious failure, it shall endure until the end of history. Unless … yes, unless I travel back through the colourful sands of Eurovision time, scrubbing away the stigma of a nul points past with fourteen heartwarming tales of life after scoreboard death, castrating that brutal phrase – snip, slash – of its malevolent might.

  So let me come to you, strange Jahn and your thirteen persecuted apostles: I wish only to cleanse myself and my nation of the guilty stain of facetious usage, to share your pain and hail your salvation, to hear where you are now, and, um, why you were then. I shall travel to your homes in Eurovision’s loneliest outposts, offering escape from exile on that light-entertainment Elba, years after finally facing your Waterloo. How could you ever refuse? You’ll feel like you win when you lose.

  On 12 February 1950, representatives of twenty-three broadcasting organisations from around the continent gathered in a Torquay conference room to hammer out a system of technical co-operation. It can’t have been a long meeting – with peace not yet five years old, technical co-operation meant establishing who’d hold the ladder and who’d twiddle the bent coat-hanger on the roof – yet the gathering was significant as the first held by the European Broadcasting Union.