The View From Here Life at Seventy by Joan Bakewell

Author:Joan Bakewell [Bakewell, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Aging, Autobiography, Biography, Comedy, Humour, Memoirs, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781843545149
Google: 9z29AAAACAAJ
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2006-09-13T23:00:00+00:00

SOMEHOW I ALWAYS end up watching it: The Eurovision Song Contest. I see it coming and resolve to avoid it. I know it's the essence of naff, the music platitudinous and the presentation garish. But something about its kitschiness draws me to it. Once it has begun, I feel the smug pleasure of recognition confirming why I hate it. Except that I don't hate it any more. I see it as some frozen moment of how we were and what we aspired to. It has a naivety left over from a more innocent age. It's a part of television's own archaeology, the strata of different eras laid down, yielding to the knowing viewer its clues to shifting allegiances and loyalties.

In May 2004 I sat down to watch the same jaded format, but what sprang to life was the new Europe: thirty-six countries voting and their choices revealing new affiliations. As usual there was the familiar political tit-for-tat: Germany voted for Turkey and Turkey for Germany; Cyprus voted for Greece, Greece for Cyprus. But what a line-up the Eastern countries made against the puny presence of old Europe; France, Britain and Ireland got hardly a look-in. What came striding through with the vigour of a new world were the former Balkan and former Soviet states, all voting for each other. Who would have expected Serbia and Montenegro to be so popular? What solidarity, too, between Poland voting for the Ukraine, and the Ukraine for Russia. At one moment the Russian presenter used a telling phrase, commending 'our Slavic neighbours'.

All this has little to do with music. I was backing the Streisand-like sound of Cyprus's entry, which did quite well. But what carried the day was the all-dancing, leather-and-thongs show put on by the Ukraine. You felt the wind gusting in from the steppes, Genghis Khan leading the rout. My wobbly geography might have got this all wrong, but that just shows my blurry grasp of what Eastern Europe is about. If it did nothing else, the Eurovision Song Contest tipped me off about a new individuality and thrust from the East that makes Western Europe look insipid, like pale English floral prints in the Mediterranean blaze.

I first knew Europe as a wretched and pitiable place. Hitler's occupation had cowed once-proud countries, leaving only brave little Britain holding out against the mighty Hun. When that colours your childhood it seems natural to believe that everything must focus around your own country, an attitude that plays to the self-regarding nature of being young. Unhappily such thinking has hung around for far too long in much of our political mindset.

Then came the Europe of seasickness and passports, as we made our first post-war, cross-Channel visits. So locked were we into our immediate past that the priority on a scholarship visit to Holland was the laying of a wreath at the Arnhem memorial. But Europe, we discovered, was a network of frontiers and controls. Guards woke us in the middle of the night as the train crossed from France to Switzerland.

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