Life imitates Father Ted. It seems the Irish Eurovision entry sounds very similar to the Danish entry from 2000, which, if true, is almost exactly the subject of a classic episode of cult comedy TV show Father Ted, My Lovely Horse.
Dougal: ‘So we wouldn’t be stealing the song then?’ Ted: ‘No, it’d be more like we were keeping their memory alive.’ Dougal: ‘So if we won we could give the prize money to their relatives?’ Ted: ‘Yeah, we’ll play that by ear.’
The full low-down on the episode is here. Classic…
Anyway, I’m now in sunny SoCal, set up with more bandwidth than I’ve had in over a year. In fact, I’m swimming in bandwidth. Plus a decent pair of speakers for the ol’ MP3 collection, at last (my last set are in storage and have been for 3 months)… happy happy joy joy.
Myself and my cat had a 16-hour flight, and somehow or other, he seems satisfied. Well, I suppose as long as the catfood and lots of petting is forthcoming, life is grass for this fella. Easily satisfied!
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 17:09:01 +0000
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: My Lovely Horse
http://www.irishnews.com/access/daily/current.asp?SID=428546
Real life repeat of Father Ted feared
By Staff reporter
IRELAND’S Eurovision hope Mickey Joe Harte has rubbished claims that his song bears a close resemblance to Denmark’s winning entry of 2000.
Eurovision fans were complaining of deja vu yesterday when listening to We’ve Got the World, which will be sung by the Lifford father-of-two. The song – written by Mark Brannigan and Keith Molloy
- is said to sound eerily like Fly on the Wings of Love, sung by the
Danish Olsen Brothers three years ago.
Mickey Joe last night said he ‘honestly couldn’t see the similarity’, but added that the first line of the chorus could be said to resemble the Danish entry.
Phil Coulter, one of the judges who watched thousands of young hopefuls perform in RTE’s You’re a Star talent show – which Mickey Joe won on Sunday night – also insisted any similarity between the two songs was purely coincidental.
But RTE’s Joe Duffy radio programme was inundated with calls from listeners who were terrified that Ireland was setting itself up for a Father Ted-like fiasco.
Listener Frank O’Reilly told Duffy that his daughter Claire, a Eurovision fanatic, spotted the similarity immediately and revealed that the words of one song could be sung over the melody of the second.
A second listener, called Margaret, also said she and her children had started singing the Danish song in their sitting room on the first night they heard We’ve Got the World.
Ironically, an episode of the hit Channel 4 comedy Father Ted featured the title character, played by Dermot Morgan, and his sidekick Fr Dougal, bidding for Eurovision glory with a ‘borrowed’ song from another Scandinavian country in a previous year.
Phil Coulter admitted that the Irish song was reminiscent of the Olsen ditty, but insisted there ‘was nothing intrinsically original’ about the Danish song.
‘There is no question that there is going to be any kind of objection and there is no question that any objection would be upheld,’ he added. — Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large :: http://www.flaneur.org.uk
Comments closed