One of the strangest and most surreal side effects of the culture wars has been the entry of what we used to call Light Entertainment onto the battlefield.
As Gareth Roberts pointed out in his latest book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall had quite a temper tantrum over Israel. “Why is a television chef being consulted on these weighty matters?” Roberts writes. “We were never treated to Fanny Cradock’s thoughts on the Tet Offensive. Viewers would have been staggered if Dorothy Sleightholme had rested her whisk on the chopping block in the Farmhouse Kitchen to give us her two penneth on Soweto. Rustie Lee was not encouraged to volunteer her opinions on the Chernobyl disaster.”
Perhaps the most mainstream and surreal example of this is Carol Vorderman — who has gone from being Rear of the Year to Rosa Luxembourg. But you can see it everywhere: any moment now I expect to find out that Basil Brush has been cancelled for inappropriate behaviour towards Mr Derek, or vice versa — it was always hard to tell who was wagging whose tail.
The latest “casualty” of the culture wars — though to call it that is to lend it more dignity than it deserves; perhaps we should describe it as the brain-dead brouhaha of the Trash Telly Top Trumps — is the Eurovision Song Contest, from which a growing number of countries are withdrawing their “artistes”. (Though anyone who witnessed last year’s most vocal opponent of Israel, one “Bambi Thug”, might conclude that using the word “artiste” to describe her is about as accurate as calling the contents of a nappy an “artefact”.) The delegations of the unfriendly nations demanded a secret vote on Israel’s participation — for the inevitable reasons — which has sensibly been rejected, indicating that the Eurovision bigwigs are pleasingly determined to dig their heels in, perhaps in the light of how popular the Israeli entry proved with the public last year; ranked joint 14th by the national juries, but dominating the leaderboard due to the results of the online and phone votes. Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK were among the countries whose viewers awarded Israel the maximum 12 points. Once again, the voice of the people (don’t forget the mocked contest attracts a larger European television audience than anything apart from big sports matches) and the voice of the captured Establishment couldn’t have been more at odds.
Not content with creating the circumstances which led to a young woman, Eden Golan, being booed while singing a song about the Hamas pogrom, many of last year’s persecutors are back for a second go. Yuval Raphael, who will represent Israel next year, was actually a survivor of the 2023 attack, so one can imagine the usual self-righteous sadists having an especially fun time barracking her. So far, Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and the Netherlands have boycotted the contest; only Spain is one of the Eurovision’s Big Five countries along with France, Germany, Italy and the UK, so I can’t imagine the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) General Assembly getting their scanties in a bunch quite yet.
It’s interesting to examine the motivation of this decidedly un-fab four. Slovenia only has a few hundred Jews — but, regrettably, what with knowing what we know about the behaviour of Eastern European countries during the Second World War, their joining in doesn’t exactly come as a shock. Since the war ended, the Netherlands have a record of stability and tolerance towards Jews, to the point that the Dutch Jewish population is growing as a result of migration, mainly from Israel; Jews born in Israel constitute about 20% of the Jews living in the Netherlands today. But the recent behaviour in Amsterdam towards Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and the massive growth in Muslim immigration may well have changed the mood of the nation, as indeed it has in the UK, where having just under four million Muslims and only around 300,000 Jews residing here has very much made many politicians puppets of the larger demographic.
In the case of Spain and Ireland, though, it’s tempting to shrug, albeit sorrowfully. What did we expect? Spain, the home of the Inquisition, repeated Jewish expulsion and forced conversion, appears to be reverting to type. The same could be said of Ireland, which has taken to anti-Israel activity with a relish that won’t surprise anyone who remembers that Eamon de Valera’s Eire was “neutral” in the war between the Allies and the Axis.
Since the Gaza conflict, the phenomenon of “top-down” antisemitism — masquerading as anti-Zionism — has been noted as being more extreme in Ireland than in any other Western nation; far from being a “bottom-up” issue, this one is driven by the political and academic elite, who have far less excuse for behaving so. (The Irish public, don’t forget, awarded Israel 10 points in the public vote last year.) There are only between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews in the Republic of Ireland; one of them, the chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland said “I always thought of myself as an Irishman who happened to be Jewish. Now I know that I am just a Jew living in Ireland.”
When I was a girl, the politics of Eurovision were a bit of a chuckle, about ancient grudges; Turkey and Greece punishing each other over Cyprus, or us and the Germans being scrupulously polite to each other while awarding each other sod-all points — an act the French were always keen to get in on with their chicly clipped “Nul points!” Then it became about Brexit. The funniest thing about the Eurovision, for me, is that its whole purpose was to make us forget our petty differences and unite as one continent in The Joy of Song, but all it has ever really done is throw our differences into sharp relief and remind us of them — which I suppose could equally be said of the EU itself. But this was knockabout stuff compared with the real viciousness which, since the Hamas attack, has been aimed directly at the world’s only Jewish state. Where will the Light Entertainment Wars end? As the least switched-on people in media often work in this field, it seems likely that, like the Japanese soldier who refused to believe the war was over, they will keep on plugging away even though those at the top of the TV pyramid have realised that this parrot is dead and are seeking to ditch identity politics in favour of something more vote-catching. So I don’t know about you, but I’m on tenterhooks till I find out what Mr Blobby’s views on puberty blockers are.
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