U.K. Eurovision entry! A lot of pearl clutching

[Colourofspring]

The outrage and comments I have seen about Olly Alexander’s performance is baffling to be honest. So much pearl clutching! Eurovision has always been completely camp and outrageous and yet suddenly he has been portrayed as some kind of disgrace and not representative of the UKs ‘values’ (what the fuck does that mean anyway?)

I like the song, I have seen him perform live at Glastonbury with years and years, he’s good live. Yes he’s openly gay - so what? Surely UK values should be based around tolerance and acceptance and not hysteria because his performance is considered risqué. Would it be considered the same if it was a load of half naked female dancers?

I am heterosexual but not offended by it - it’s just a performance - I hope he wins as he’s a nice guy!

So much pearl clutching!

So why did Sam Ryder come second? They just decided to randomly let us off that year.

It's funny because I'm resolutely not homophobic, amd i love Olly Alexamder, but I had to concede the crotch grabbing dancers were a bit tasteless, even for Eurovision.

I didn't notice it at first - am completrly desensitised to vulgarity it seems, but my husband was clutching his pearls a bit and then I kinda saw his point.

It had proper dirty and filth vibes. Awful.

Gay equality being taken back 50 years with all this modern stuff

When Cliff Richard first came on the scene the headline were Is this boy to sexy for television! People have always been outraged by something!

There we go .

Yes I believe so in the light of the fact that we had hosted for the Ukraine and all the support we had given them

I love Olly, he's a great singer and actor.Not crazy about the song or the complicated routine but couldn't give a fig that it's camp. And I can remember seeing Pearl and Teddy Johnson doing eurovision in the 50s with 'Sing little birdie'. It was really uncool then,at least it's a jolly bit of nonsense now,with politics though...

Not true. I’m in Sweden and we would have voted if we liked the song. We always go for UK in football etc.

Big old dyke here (and a far from Puritanical one at that.) It's not homophobia. People (myself included) are just sick to fucking death of every single little thing being sexualised for shock value. It was fun for 10 seconds in the 90's when Madonna started the craze. Now she is a 65 year old gyrating on stage like a slag and snogging women (yawn). As for Olly, Sam Smith et al...you're better than this shit. Your voice is enough, we don't need your genitals as well!

Funny how politics didn’t affect the votes when it was Sam Ryder!

Also, it’s irrelevant whether it was a shower room or urinals. My guess is that it was only set in a shower room because Olly couldn’t get the powers that be to agree to it being set in urinals

The UK hosted the year after,2023, because they came second in 2022.

Perhaps if they concentrated on making half decent music rathet than trying to out do eachother in the "who can be the most shockingly camp" stakes maybe we wouldnt keep churning out such shite music.
And its hardly shocking any more in any case, its all been done before

No problem with anyone being gay, but if you want to push it down my throat, at least buy me dinner first! Eurovision wasn't always camp, of course. I do rather miss the days when it at least pretended to be a search for the best new song, performed by an established artiste. Now it just seems to be a rather desperate exercise in boundary-pushing. The British entry wasn't the best song of the year, it wasn't even the best song since lunchtime.

Exactly this! No-one is clutching their pearls….we’re just bored by it all.

@exaltedwombat how was Olly being gay being pushed down your throat though?
It was no different to women twerking about sexually in pop videos.

@GoodAfternoonGoodEveningAndGoodnight Don't take a gag line too seriously! (See what I did there?) :-)

@PatsyStonesBeehive & @Hoppinggreen Couldn't agree more.

Nothing to do with homophobia for me, it was just a bit shit. Performed in a grubby looking toilet with grubby costumes, boring song and he didn’t sing it that well. It was better when he came onto the stage proper, it sounded better 🤷‍♀️ I also spent the first 2 minutes thinking it was pre-recorded as it didn’t even seem to be on the main stage and wondering how they got away with that. Not offensive particularly, just a bit meh.

Even more meh if you were in the arena and couldn’t see the performance from most places in the audience.

They missed the mark completely, and even disrespected the paying audience.

My only complaint about Olly's performance last night was how much my eyes tripped with the lighting and the room movement effects.

The costumes were a little odd, but original (boxing pad codpiece anyone?), but it was just that- a costume. They weren't offensive. To be fair, I fancy myself walking round the supermarket in the Slovenian entry outfit!! But with my rolls, they might try and put me in the chiller with the joints of meat! 🤣

I think it has gotten more "camp" and inclusive over the years because (and no offence meant, forgive me if this sounds bad) the LGBTQ+ community are the majority of fans these days. I may have that wrong, but if it's true, why shouldn't countries try and appeal to the community by representing them with their entries?
There are bigger fish to fry in the world than arguing over something like a music competition.

It was so cringey.

Not shocking, just boring and desperate.

No. We came second in 2022 and then hosted for Ukraine in 2023. We came second because it was a good song performed by a talented singer. The last two years the performance was shite.

I agree with this. The staging crossed a line into distracting and off-putting. I said it straight away at the end of the performance, and I think the zero audience vote partly reflects that. Sure there might be some homophobes out there, but that doesn’t explain the zero vote as homophobes wouldn’t vote for loads of entries! At the end of the day dancers on their hands and knees with other dancers standing behind them is just tasteless, whether the dancers on the floor are men or women.

Does inclusive nowadays just mean LGBT because the British commentary team were all gay men and 3 out of 4 were white and all of the finalist bar one were white. And all of the people giving scores were white I think. So not really that inclusive.

@80schildhood Ha! 🙌🏼