All entries for Sunday 13 May 2007

Did you get the joke?

Writing about web page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krisse_Salminen

Eurovision. Did you get the in-joke? Because I didn’t.

But the blonde girl who kept sticking her ore in throughout the evening was – apparently – a spoof. Krisse Salminen is a Finnish stand-up whose routine is to prance around like a cross between Miss Piggy and Paris Hilton.

Unfortunately, Finnish comedy doesn’t seem to travel very well, and no-one seems to have realised she was a joke.

Perhaps they should have tried Borat.

: 13 May 2007 22:56 |  Tags: Comedy Eurovision Television |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Crazy Mother Hubbards

Scientologists… I know berating someone’s “beliefs” isn’t very politically correct, but what a bunch of nutters!

This Monday’s Panorama looks like being a bit of a humdinger, as John Sweeney confronts the people who believe the teachings of an American sci-fi writer. Only Tom Cruise… you might think.

The best bit about Scientology is that it’s only open to the wealthy. And if you hand over enough cash, you get told the baffling stories of Ron L. Hubbard secrets of the cult religion:

Xenu is introduced as an alien ruler of the “Galactic Confederacy” who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth in spacecraft resembling Douglas DC-8 airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. The alien souls continue to do this today, causing a variety of physical ill-effects in modern-day humans.

It’s like Toy Story, albeit scarier.

The documentary’s already causing controversy, after the reporter John Sweeney lost his cool – to put it mildly – while interviewing a Scientologist. The situation wasn’t helped because the Scientologists were filming everything the BBC were filming – standard procedure for arguing against common sense.

Of course you can watch the Scientologists’ version or the BBC’s version. I know which I believe.

Panorama’s on BBC One, Monday at 8.30pm.

: 13 May 2007 12:11 |  Tags: BBC Cult John Sweeney Panorama Religion Scientology Tom Cruise |  Comments (10) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Eurononsense

Oh dear. It gets more ridiculous every year. I swear Yugoslavia keeps dividing like an amoeba just to secure a win every couple of years. The Serbia / Montenegro love-in was particularly daft.

The Eurovision Song Contest is hardly the pinnacle of European musical talent (if it was, it’d be dominated by Brits and Yanks, and if you don’t believe me, check out the charts), but the competition seems to laugh in the face of ‘music’ even harder than it ever has.

Musically, I thought the Georgian Matrix Reloaded-style rave-up song was pretty good, although Mrs Doubtfire’s Ukrainian entry was also mildly entertaining. I thought they had it sown up, to be honest.

The Eurovision party I went to (my first, and perhaps last) did seem to degenerate into a ‘hot or not’ contest, involving the entrants as well as the Fearne Cotton-type voting people around Europe. Iceland didn’t let us down, it was decided, although Sweden went with a man, much to the disappointment of the boys. The girls were just as bad though – if a bloke showed a bit of thigh they were panting and sweating.

We came second-last only to Ireland, and that was entirely thanks to the bias of Ireland themselves (shooting themselves in the foot yet again) and the Maltese. We may as well give the Isle of Wight a vote…

: 13 May 2007 11:02 |  Tags: Eurovision Song Contest Music Television Terry Wogan |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem