Are you watching Eurovision this weekend? It used to be an innocent enough question. But it’s fast becoming a loaded one, as the silliest, frothiest, most joyfully kitsch event in music collides with a political crisis that it seems woefully ill-equipped to handle. Imagine a raucously drunken hen night, stumbling accidentally across a funeral procession.
This is far from the first time the annual song contest has taken place under the shadow of war. But it’s the first time I can remember Britain’s entrant bursting into tears in an interview, confessing to being “holed up in a hotel room trying not to have a breakdown” over the pressure for him to quit, or contestants becoming lightning rods for this degree of anger. Armed police now watch over the arena, while the Swedish host city of Malmö saw thousands joining street protests on Thursday night as tensions rose ahead of a threatened Israeli ground invasion of Rafah.
