Greetings from the anti-Eurovision Cannes film festival

Your correspondent is in France for the Cannes film festival. There is, I'm sure, some appalling event on tonight that would offer me free wine. It might even be on a boat.

You spend all evening trying to position yourself at the nearest spot to the mini hamburgers while doing everything possible to avoid contact with representatives of the studio, content provider, national broadcaster or whoever else is hosting the wearying function.

In the past all they desired was a line in the newspaper. Now the mediabots feel it necessarily to tweet shameless promotional suck-ups before they’ve finished their first glass of Château Flog-Me. “Thanks for a great evening, Funky Armadillo Media!” they write beneath a photograph of themselves forcing crabmeat into fat, greasy cheeks.

I'd rather drink septic waste. Not for the first time I will probably spend the end of the evening watching the Eurovision Song Contest in my hotel room.

French Graham Norton

Being terminally lazy and a notorious cultural imperialist, I have not learned to speak French well. (In this context “well” essentially means “at all”.) Listening to the domestic commentary when so constrained is an absorbing experience.

The tone suggests that the French Graham Norton is no less amused by the experience than the Corkonian original. Amplified sniggering greets the appearance of any eastern European in ethnic clothing. Weary sighs underscore the opening jokes by toothy local presenters. A noise that indicates ennui with the human condition succeeds overly generous mutual voting between adjacent, culturally familiar nations.

Christer Björkman, a producer of this year's show, recently dared to criticise the late (and genuinely lamented) Terry Wogan for lowering the tone of the evening. "He did this for 28 years, and his commentary always forced the mockery side, and there is a grown-up generation in Britain that doesn't know anything better," he said.

Shut it, Björkman. I can remember the years before Wogan, and we were quite capable of laughing at Finns in romper suits without any prompting. Yes, the Eurovision did then guarantee the winner a Europewide hit and some degree of temporary fame.

In 1974, when the mighty Abba triumphed, it even managed to launch a lastingly great pop act. But the show was a private joke in most homes before Wogan made it a public one.

Something has, however, changed since he began laughing at men playing flutes made from antlers. For a decade or so the BBC coverage felt just the tiniest bit subversive. For all our sniggering, the Eurovision Song Contest remained a marquee event in the year’s cultural calendar. Look how much money this thing cost. Look how many people care. Are we allowed to treat it as accidental comedy?

The subsequent appropriation of Eurovision by the gay community pressed home its intriguing status as an event wrapped in riddles and marinated in irony.

The problem is that, as the new century has progressed, so much popular culture has been sucked into the irony sump that core meanings have become ever harder to discern.

The Irish summer happens between the Eurovision Song Contest and the Rose of Tralee beauty pageant. Christmas kicks off with The Late Late Toy Show. All three are pitched, or at least appreciated, in so many tones that the original intentions have withered into insignificance.

Nostalgic wallow

Fans of the

Late Late

used to hate the

Toy Show

. Now it’s partly a nostalgic wallow and partly a low-camp roister. The Rose of Tralee beauty pageant (yes, I am going to keep calling it that) prides itself on its modernity, but, out there on Twitter, it exists largely to facilitate comparisons with its

[ satirical incarnation from Father Ted ]

. Even an event as huge as the Oscars now must allow endless self-satirising digs from its own host.

The sheer mass of popular culture has become so indigestibly enormous that we are forced to place much of it between inverted commas and engage with it at an uninvolved distance.

All of which brings us back to the Cannes film festival. You can say all kinds of awful things about this event. It’s hierarchical, a bit staid and somewhat pompous. But you can’t argue that it doesn’t take itself seriously.

It’s refreshing to find a huge cultural event that still dares to thinks its chosen medium worthy of serious consideration. The stuff on yachts is a different matter.