The real Eurovision winners are not the acts but the host nations seeking integration into Europe, writes Karen Fricker in Kiev.
An obese middle-aged man in a pink satin suit is running up and down across the floor of Kiev's Palats Sportu, waving a Norwegian flag on a staff high above the crowd. Security guards and orange-shirted volunteers try to restrain him but back off, apparently daunted by the sheer power of positive feeling emanating from him.
Wig Wam - a Darkness-like foursome of ageing glam rockers - are performing on stage at the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final, and the crowd is on its feet, loving the group's irreverent intensity and the song's driving beat.
"Wig Wam!" screams Pink Man joyously. "NORWAY!!!"
Two hours later, the scene outside the Palats Sportu's stage door is considerably more subdued. A dwindling crowd of tired and emotional fans and paparazzi is waiting for the losing acts to straggle out of the backstage area. Nowhere to be seen are Ireland's Donna and Joe McCaul, reportedly hanging back in the green room absorbing their disappointment, though Joe later releases an unhappy statement about what he perceives to be "bloc voting" - countries voting for neighbours and allies rather than for the best song and performance in the contest.
Such are the highs and lows in the circus-like atmosphere of Eurovision, where fan culture creates a bizarre bubble of euphoria, and performers go from being stars to also-rans in the course of an evening. It is notoriously dubious, however, whether winning Eurovision guarantees anything close to a real music career. The real potential benefit from Eurovision participation is not for the acts themselves but the host countries, for which the broadcast functions like a huge national advertisement to some 100 million viewers, in Europe and Australia.
This is an opportunity which Ukraine has grabbed with both hands. It is barely six months since this former Soviet republic was last in the world's spotlight, then because of the political turmoil of the Orange Revolution which resulted in the election of reformist President Victor Yuschenko. Now Yuschenko's government is turning the country's recent past into a something of a consumer brand: part of the country's vision for Eurovision, says Yevhen Perelygin, Ukraine's ambassador to Ireland, is to give visitors and locals "a feeling of what it was like just a few months ago" via the creation of a "revolutionary young atmosphere".
While the government's vision of the contest as a youth event has proven somewhat out of focus (less than 500 visitors have taken advantage of Eurocamp, a tent city created to accommodate up to 5,000 Eurovision visitors), Ukraine's organisation of Eurovision has been highly impressive. Thursday night's semi-final broadcast went forward without an apparent hitch and featured more technological bells and whistles than ever before: 20 cameras (including 12 moving on dollies and cranes), revolving circular television screens showing live video on the chrome-and-mirrored set, and flawlessly executed televoting. The organisers have even managed to make the Palats Sportu look presentable by wrapping it in green netting and flashing orange lights - but if you look a bit closer, its grim Stalinist architecture shows through. A metaphor, perhaps, for the reality of current life in Ukraine that leaks out through the cracks in the Eurovision hype.
The oppressive police presence and blank-faced bureaucratic response to problem-solving are evidence of a culture that is still in the very early stages of a process of profound change.
In the years following the fall of communism, Ukraine experienced the most severe economic collapse ever recorded in a country that had not experienced a war. In the grip of corrupt capitalism, the inflation rate spiraled to an almost inconceivable 10,000 per cent in 1993. Things were so bad under pro-Russian president Leonid Kuchma that many Ukranians began to advocate a return to traditional communist systems.
The challenge that the current government now faces is not just to usher in economic, political and social reform but to aid a shift in the pervasive mentality of distrust and pessimism in the populace. The social problems the country faces are massive: it has the fastest rate of HIV/Aids transmission in the world; a stark rural/urban divide that sees 29 per cent of the population living under the poverty line; rampant alcoholism (a bottle of vodka costs €1.50); and an estimated 100,000 street kids for whom little to no government resources are available.
THOSE ARE THE downsides. The positives are that the economy is on a slow build, and that the government of Yushenko and his powerful prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko is starting to break down the power of the handful of oligarchs who became uber-rich under Kuchma, and is creating important international links. Yuschenko recently announced that Ukraine's top priority is European integration - and that's exactly where Eurovision comes in.
Ambassador Perelygin sums up the government's position on the contest when he calls it an "opportunity to present Ukraine as a nation that is 100 per cent geographically, historically and culturally European". The promotional tag line for this year's contest is "Ukraine - in the centre of Europe", which is a literal fact but is also a means of communicating the country's asserted European-ness. This thinking is strategic and aspirational: Ukraine has only just agreed on a three-year action with the EU, after which its potential for joining the EU will be reviewed again; it seems unlikely that the country could accede to the EU within this decade.
The Ukranian government ploughed €15.7 million into the Eurovision Song Contest, money that arguably might have been better spent confronting immediate social concerns. But such a line of thinking doesn't take into account the enormous publicity benefits and potential boost to tourism that Eurovision hosting can bring. In the reasoning of Dublin-born Frank O'Donnell, the United Nations' Resident Co-ordinator in Ukraine, the country's Eurovision participation makes perfect sense: "There is a tremendous potential dividend in holding it here and making it a first-class show. It is a great opportunity to both showcase and maintain the country's momentum."
Ukraine's embrace of Eurovision's possibilities is part of a larger trend of countries on the outer borders of the continent using the contest as a way to gain access to European legitimacy; an Observer wag recently called the contest the "antechamber to Brussels". Since transsexual Israeli singer Dana International's 1998 victory, nearly all Eurovision winners have been from the we-try-harder European hinterlands: Estonia, Latvia, Turkey and now Ukraine.
Given the results of Thursday's semi-final, this trend seems in no danger of altering, with first-time competitors Moldova (Europe's poorest country) advancing to the final along with Balkan neighbours Macedonia and Croatia, leaving western European countries such as Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands scratching their heads and licking their wounds.
IRELAND HAS SOME pretty serious soul-searching of its own to do following Donna and Joe's defeat. Karl Broderick's Love? was a nice piece of classic Eurovision pop with a Riverdance-influenced break, but Ireland in this and recent years has simply been out of step with the Eurovision mainstream; the local talent contest approach via RTÉ's televoting programme You're a Star does not seem to be offering up acts that have anything close to a winning edge.
The head of RTÉ's Eurovision delegation, Julian Vignoles, acknowledges that an overhaul of the country's approach is called for: after Thursday, "everything will be examined in our approach to Eurovision - including You're A Star," he promised.
The larger question remains, however, of whether Ireland needs Eurovision any more: the country's self-image and international profile benefited hugely from its multiple Eurovision victories in the 1980sand 1990s. Now, in today's Ireland, it's fashionable to dismiss Eurovision as something tacky and of our past - though its perennially high viewer ratings reveal the extent to which it still exerts a fascination. But the countries to which Eurovision continues to matter are those that can use it as a stepping stone to growth and a sense of cultural legitimacy that are arguably already in Ireland's possession.
Because the 10 semi-finalists were announced en masse, without the specific results for each country being revealed, it is not yet known how the voting really panned out on Thursday night, and how merited Joe McCaul's bitter comments are about "bloc voting".
We will know much more after tonight to what extent countries within specific regions are grouping together and supporting each other - an approach being unabashedly advocated by the Greek favourite, Helena Paparizou, who has been circulating in Kiev with the Cypriot and Maltese contestants and making a lot of noise about Mediterranean solidarity.
Were Greece to win, it would make a nice hat-trick along with its 2004 Olympics hosting and European football championship victory. But there is enormous hunger to win emanating from the Balkans as well.
Skopje in 2006? It may not be out of the question.