Wednesday 31 August 2011

A Missed Missed Opportunity and an Unmissed Missed Opportunity.

So I was chatting with Phil last night about possible MO's for the week, and I suggested Katie Lovely from the 2001 Irish final - a song with great resonance in OnEurope circles, as it spawned our beloved Katie Hideous. More than one song in the years since has been totally Katie Hideous.

"That'll do nicely!" he replied, which is a sure indicator that I need to keep looking.

So I found this instead, from the UK. 1962 is about as far back as I'm ever likely to go for this feature, and I can't even find any visuals for it. Just a nice little YouTube video featuring a long, lingering shot of the record sleeve (remember when records had sleeves? Remember "records"? Remember "music permanently stored on physical media"?). Oh dear. Showing my age again...

Donna Douglas - The Message In A Bottle. It didn't win.

[EDIT] - Hey, I'll tell you what... I don't think that's a record sleeve at all. I think that's the front cover of a piece of sheet music. Heavens above!

Friday 26 August 2011

For my repost...

This week - I have hidden the ICBM's and the not-so-smart bombs back in the cupboard and delved into the real missed file...

Can't believe we haven't done this one!


Wednesday 24 August 2011

Denmark, land of opportunity (missed)

I know I'll regret going to Denmark for our little musical tour, as Phil is heavily armed with deeply distressing missed Danish opportunity and there'll probably be either a scatter-gun bombardment or a precision strike of awfulness within 20 minutes of him reading this. Nevertheless, I shall take the punt.

It's a double dose of decisive Danish winningness for the week. The performers - 37 years' span of ESC winningness. The songs... 1 year's span of not so much. But it was the late 1970s and DR had only just come back from a long holiday and they'd pretty much forgotten how to do it, so we can forgive them. I think.

Olsen Brothers - San Francisco. Didn't win.

Grethe Ingmann and Bjarne Liller - Alt Er Skont. Didn't win.

Friday 19 August 2011

An opportunity which urgently needs to be missed

So, word on the wire is that Geri wants to reform the Spice Girls and head off to Baku to get some styling and consulting tips from the delightful Mehriban Aliyeva, and maybe perform one of their songs for her. Sources are the ever-reliable "Some media outlets... somewhere. In Europe. And other places", so it's likely to be true.

We at OnEurope have this to say on the subject:

Mrrrrpphhhhphhhht.

That is all. Unless it ends up looking something like this, in which case we at OnEurope will be wholly supportive of the endeavour.


Wednesday 17 August 2011

Nick is clearly deranged

Because the MO of modern MF is clearly.....

THIS


An unusually recent missed opportunity.

Looking back at my choices of missed opportunity over the years, I can see a pattern having formed. Apparently the 80s and 90s were brilliant, the 70s were OK and time stopped round about the turn of the millennium. This clearly isn't right.

I also have this habit of ignoring the bottomless pit of missedness that is Melodyfe... Medolif.... Mediothingy. This, clearly, must change.

Now, logically, knowing everything that we now know, Sweden must have missed an opportunity big time in 2010. Or did they? Would this have been the perfect moment to get Eric off the waiting list, or is Popular the better bet? Buggered if I know...


Sunday 14 August 2011

I think its my turn

Talking of things that have been missed by Europe, at this Juncture I feel I must mention this little ditty - sounds familiar?
Clearly The Colonel decided a song about Chicken was not appropriate for Eurovision, so she wisely changed it to a song about an old woman with young kids, thats *so* much safer!!!

Wednesday 10 August 2011

I predict a trio... of Missed Opportunithrees!

So yeah, it's all a bit miserable here on the little island at the moment. Riots this, riots that, riots the other... and I'm a Scrabble player.

Natural enough, then that in contrast to sane people, my thoughts have frequently turned to trios this week - and I've got a trio of trios for you. Three is, indeed, the magic number!

We start in 1989, in some provincial theatre that they'd just opened in Stockholm. Not sure what happened to it, I suppose it still gets occasional gigs now and then. This bunch of reprobates, together with their hair, finished an appropriate third. Which was probably about right.


I'd ideally at this point introduce one of the many trios from the UK Song For Europe 1983, which really was Trio Central - but they seem to have largely disappeared from the YouTubesphere. Pity. I've found something from 1986 here instead, which is about one third hair and about two-thirds slightly worrying looking minders. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's got another boyfriend on the far side of town, quite honestly. It's utterly refusing to embed, also, so let's linkify it instead. Probably saves a bit of bandwidth anyway.

Finally - finalement - finallich - a little complaint. Looking for Israeli missed opportunities in Hebrew is a living hell for a Latinate alphaphile like myself, so this week you're not getting the rather awesome Ah'avat David from the 1995 Kdam as I can't find it, and will have to settle for this strange thing from 1996 which stretches the trio theme of the night considerably further than it will go. For a start, there seem to be about six of the buggers...


Wednesday 3 August 2011

Nick Potter and the Half-Baked Missed Opportunity

Now, long-term readers will know that we at OnEurope have a love-hate relationship with the good people of Belgium. Specifically, those who live in Brussels and try to eke out a living by either forcing people to sign petitions for the homeless people-children of Europe or charging 5 Euros for a thimbleful of beer that wouldn't make a flea drunk or trying to turn a small model of a building that was never actually built in 1958 into a tourist attraction; those people are firmly on our Not Love list, and they're at best borderline for our Good People list.

Other Belgians are, of course, available. Like Matiz. Matiz really ought to have been somewhere close to the plane to Jerusalem in 1999, but VRT weren't really on their best form and decided to send I've Got The Windy Pops or something instead, leaving poor Matiz stuck in the semi-final with a points total to match the title of the song.

I think it's actually fairly cool.