taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

A friend of a friend writes:

Unless you are pretty good at avoiding the media, you will be aware that Dustin the Turkey has been chosen as one of six finalists for RTE’s Eurosong, the winner of which will go on to represent Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest in Serbia in May.

What you may not be aware of is that I wrote and recorded the song with him and need your votes to help get me to Serbia!!!

The TV show will be broadcast live on RTE this Saturday Feb 23rd, at 7pm. It is a televote (a la X-factor format), so get your mobile phones ready. The results are at 9:45pm.

The song, Irlande Douze Points, is a parody on the current types of songs, acts and block-voting in the Eurovision. It may make your ears bleed a bit, you may ask yourself why, but what the hell, send someone you know to the final!!!

Apparently, Dustin urges the contest judges to “give douze points to Ireland, for its lowlands and its highlands, for Terry Wogan’s wig and Bono’s leather pants. We brought you Guinness and Westlife, 800-years of war and strife, but we all apologise for Riverdance.”

Check out the outraged reactions from Ireland’s past Eurovision “winners”:

Frank McNamara, who wrote two of the Irish Eurovision winners, asked whether RTE, the state broadcaster that selected the six acts, was “giving two fingers” to Irish ’song’writers. “I think it is absolutely disgraceful.”

Shay Healy, who wrote Johnny Logan’s Eurovision hit What’s Another Year?, wondered “how any bunch of grown-ups could come up with this as a solution”

Phil Coulter thought that Eurovision was going “down the tubes”.

The choice on Saturday is between a turkey puppet taking the piss in a Northside accent, and such po-faced “serious pop” mawkfests as ‘“Double Cross My Heart” performed by Donal Skehan’ and ‘“Time to Rise” performed by Maya’. snore. You know it’s got to be the turkey.

Here’s the official Bebo page, and the Facebook group — and here’s the song itself:

Update: actually, here’s another, higher quality clip — with an entirely different song! Let’s hope this is the one…

Update 2: he won. Dana and the other professional Eurovision types have been chewing wasps, it’s hilarious!

Tags: dustin, eurovision, ireland, music, pranks

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

Tags: bandwidth, dougal, entry, episode, eurovision, father, joy, life, show, song