Russian disgust over Sweden Eurovision skit

http://www.thelocal.se/18250/20090316/

It would've been even funnier if this had been Swedens official contribution to this years Eurovision.

My favorite parts:

1:The red stars on the dancers butts
2:DANCING BEAR!
3:The song itself. It's insanely catchy.

View the performance here:
The entire skit(starts in swedish but it's mainly in english):
http://svtplay.se/v/1481181/tingeling_goes_russia

yooooooooooooooooooo

they really put a lot of effort into this zing

another divide between Eastern and Western europe. Eastern Europe countries taking the contest a little too serious.. and Western ones, seeing as they will never win anyway, having fun/tongue in cheek jokes. :)

A few years ago, when Eurovision was going to be held in Latvia, a skit in the Norwegian final that was supposed to be a example of Latvian culture was filled with cusachs, sabre dance and typical Russian folk costumes. Needless to say, the Latvians were not too amused.

There was actually a time when Sweden did take the Contest seriously. I'm wondering if there's a pattern here, a progressively piss-take attitude to the whole thing as countries become more enmeshed in the thing? I think that probably a watershed for a country is the year that it wins, followed by the next year when it hosts. Then after that the rot begins to set in and that country starts to take the Contest less and less seriously. So going back to Sweden, they took it seriously up until ABBA won. Now Russia have been taking it seriously for the past few years, but since Dima won last year, maybe this is the beginning of the Russians starting to take the piss out of the whole thing? But right now they can't do that, because they're hosting it this year, so they have to be all uptight and righteous when someone pokes fun at the whole enterprise.

Snoball: I think you're taking this the wrong way. Sweden is probably the one country in Europe that take this competition more seriously than any other! We have 4 qualifying competitions and then a grand finale where the people select the winner that will represent the country in the Eurovision. Each of these national qualifiers have atleast 3-3,5 million viewers(of a population of 9 million) so you can imagine how important and popular this competition is to Swedes.

And this skit was just a joke, not a contribution to the compeition so I don't see why you're making all kinds of assumptions on Swedens relationship to Eurovision.

http://4lyrics.missingstudios.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/dj-300x199.jpg

This is great, thanks for posting it.

ESC, in a way, is taken seriously in Norway now too, but still in a kind of "ironic" way.

In Sweden it's more like people acting as if they like it in an ironic way when they actually love it for real. Personally I wish we had a more relaxed attitude towards the competition. Not this mania we have right now.

It's the same in the UK but many times worse because what feels like increased interest has coincided with (or indeed been spurred by) by pathetic song choices and results.