THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST (4)

This evening I watched the Danish competition to choose the country's entry for this year's Eurovision song contest. I hadn't particularly wanted to; but since my mother-in-law had invited me for dinner beforehand and wanted to watch it, it seemed churlish not to.

This year's competition had added spice, since Denmark will be hosting the main event in May, having won it in Sweden a year ago. Despite that incentive, I thought most of the ten songs either poor or dreadful. However, while that is pretty par for the course, what was surprising was that nine of the ten were sung in English. Denmark tends to hold the local competition in Danish, and then translate the winning song into English for the international event. This time nobody seemed to bother, yet another example of English's increasing dominance in the music world.

Walter Blotscher