Eurovision Dread

It’s the time of year when, for a few days, I live in a state of fear.

It’s Eurovision week.

In 2017, for the first time in a very long time, I properly watched the Eurovision final. That year it was in Kyiv. I was only slightly conscious of the fact that there were semi-finals, but our bloke Salvador Sobral had got through in the semis and there was a bit of a buzz around the city and on the telly during the week because the odds were looking pretty good for him to win. The first time I heard his song, though, was in the Saturday night final. It was a great song. Amar pelos dois. Shocked, I turned to my girls. “Oh, I like that.” They rolled their eyes.

When Portugal wins a big football game, a national cheer goes up from all the open windows in the country, with up to a thirty second delay, depending on which network you’re on.

That night, Salvador won all the points and Portugal cheered. It was really moving and thirty seconds later, it moved some more people.

When Portugal wins a big football game, the country’s mood is lifted for a couple of days, until everybody drifts back into a state of fado induced saudades and sadness, but when we won Eurovision, it lasted quite a bit longer. The winning song was played on every single radio station all day on a loop for months, and by my 800th listen, as lovely the song is, I did not want to hear it any more.

Over the summer, the country calmed down, and by the end of September, it felt like we were back to normal and I could just forget about Eurovision.

“Hi Lucy, do you want to come and do Eurovision with us?”

The message was from a boss from years before, now a boss at RTP, the national broadcaster, like the BBC but with adverts.

What they could possibly want me for I had no idea, but instead of asking what, I just replied “Yeah, ok!” I’ve worked plenty “in TV” but never “at the TV” so hell, let’s see, I thought. I reckoned that since the next Eurovision was nine months away, they’d call me in for whatever it was maybe a month before the final.

The next day, I was told I was in the script team and met a gang of RTP people who I had never clapped eyes on before. They were “the core team” who welcomed me with big friendly smiles, each one the head of a division in the mad endeavour that is a national broadcaster putting on Eurovision for 200 million spectators.

My security credential. The photo was taken after a spectacular bout of a stomach flu had done the rounds of the office, hence the haunted look, and grey shadows under my eyes.

I had no idea what Eurovision entailed. I had imagined that it was just putting on a big show, with maybe a few weeks of frantic prep beforehand, but I was joining an enterprise that had already been hard at it since the night that Salvador won in Kyiv.

In January, we took over a large office in Parque das Nações. Two hundred or so people in groups around the office, in divisions and subdivisions. It took weeks for me to understand what the hell everybody was doing. The teams were made up of people from RTP, and from some of the big Portuguese production companies. Some were international old hands of Eurovision. There was the Show Production team, which produced the stage show. The TV Show Production team which produced the TV show of the stage show. The script team, my team, was part of both of those teams. Then there was the Security Team who kept us all safe, the Logistics Team who prepared the city to receive the dozens of acts and their retinues plus the hundreds of thousands of people who would come to watch, the VFX Team who made it all pretty, the Promotion Team who got the sponsors, the Stage Team who built the stage and managed it. At the head of it all were the RTP Executive Producer and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) Eurovision Team who oversaw everything so that it remained sufficiently Eurovisionish.

In the script team, my main role was Defucker of English in The Scripts, but as time went by I became Defucker of English of Pretty Much Everything which meant that I could stick my nose into all areas, which is very much what I like to do in all circumstances. I got to know people I would never have met otherwise, from Portugal and all over Europe (but mostly Sweden, obviously), and made friends, many of whom will be for life.

We moved into the Arena, and behind airport style security, and now, two normally Italian restaurants fed us canteen food twice a day, which was fantastic until, after a fortnight, it wasn’t, but it was ok, because we were all losing our minds and food wasn’t important any more. Showbiz baby!

By now, in March, there were two thousand people working full time on Eurovision. We worked from morning till midnight for the last three or so months prepping for the two semi-finals and the final.

All the songs from all the countries had been chosen, and from then until the night of the final, the only thing we ever heard was those 43 songs, being staged, being blocked in, being choreographed, being rehearsed, being piped through to the offices on monitors. All. Day. That kind of thing rewires your brain.

I got to play being all the jury members from all countries for system checking. My comedy accents went down very well. “Lucy!” they shouted down from the gallery “Just do it in English, please!”. I got to pretend I was going to do the voiceover for the show “Welcome to Eurovision Twenty Eighteeeeeeeen!”…. “Azerbaijaaaaan” and bugged the executive producer for days to let me do the real thing. I still have my recordings of it somewhere.

The final week finally came, and 2,000 people used up the last of their adrenaline to pull it together. Netta won with her song Toy, and everybody was happy. We’d done it.

[If you ever win Eurovision and need to know how it all works, I’ll tell you all the ins and outs, and all the bits in between, but I’m not going to bore you with all that here]

It was the maddest few months of my life. We took thousands of photos, of course. In the days after the final, when some of us were tying stuff up, or just finding it hard to leave, I looked at the pictures of my friends that I took in January, and then the ones I took in the last week. We were mere husks of our former selves, quite scarily so. We had all gone grey. Not our hair, but our faces, but it was one of the very best times of my life and in some important ways changed it.

There’s one tiny remnant of me in the Eurovision final that has stuck for the last six years, a little tiny thing to do with the results. I look out for it every year, hoping they never change it back to the old way, which was wrong.

Why do I dread Eurovision week?

I dread Portugal winning again.

I dread being asked to do it all again.

I dread, even more than that, though, not being asked to do it all again.