Eurovision will always be magic for Marty
There might be no competition but for Whelan tonight the show (of sorts) must go on to cheer up the country with the maddest and most memorable acts to grace the stage...
BY RIGHTS, broadcaster Marty Whelan should have been walking the streets of Rotterdam at first light this morning, before stopping to drink a coffee in a small café and watching the city wake up. It’s part of his annual Eurovision ritual, having a ‘gawk,’ as he calls it, at whatever place is hosting that year’s song contest.
Instead the long-time commentator will be making the all too familiar journey into the RTE studios at Donnybrook in Dublin 4, from his home in Malahide. For although the competition has been called off thanks to the pandemic, the show still goes on.
Eurovision: Europe Shine A Light is a two-hour long programme celebrating one of the world’s most unique television events. It will feature a taste of all the 41 entries from this year, past winners and ‘plenty of surprises.’
‘It’ll be a bit daft, snippets of each of the songs and special guests,’ says Whelan. ‘They haven’t really given us an accurate list of what’s going to happen, so that’ll be funny.’ So he’ll be on ‘the hoof,’ so to speak? ‘But sure that’s the story of my life,’ he laughs. ‘Particularly with the Eurovision because things can change. But yes, if I was in Rotterdam I’d be able to see stuff, I’d know this girl was coming out in that dress, or this fella will be in a cage, or whatever the heck. But I won’t know anything now. We’ll all find out together!’
This should have been the 22nd time for Irish fans to hear Whelan lend his wit to the Eurovision commentary .
‘The first time was in 1987, when I got to go to Belgium, that was Johnny Logan’s second win,’ he says. ‘I returned in 2000, and I’ve been doing it ever since.’
Indeed, the Lyric FM breakfast show host has proved to be a perfect fit for one of the more eccentric and much loved telly events of the year. He treats the show with a gentle respect, while acknowledging the nuttiness of it all with his trademark sense of slapstick humour, usually with the help of a bottle of Baileys — a little trick he picked up from the late great Terry Wogan.
Ordinarily he would have flown out to Holland last Sunday, with an RTE team, commentated on the two semi-finals during the week and then finished up with tonight’s finale.
‘Instead I’m doing the show tonight in an isolated studio, basically just me and a bottle of Baileys, talking you through what I see,’ he says. ‘I’ll have some information and I’ll be working with a very experienced Eurovision team, but we’re a very small group, just three of us so it’s going to be very different.
‘But the fact that the Dutch have decided they are going to put out a programme I think is marvellous. It’s still going to be on all the channels across Europe live, there’s still a buzz about it. In fact, every time I hear the Eurovision music I still get a chill after all these years.
‘It’s one of the highlights of the year for sure, but then a lot of things aren’t happening — a lot of appearances and compering jobs, a trip to Italy to see an opera with some of my Lyric FM listeners —all gone.
‘I’ll miss the Eurovision terribly but I’ve had communication from a number of fellow commentators during the week, just saying they miss the craic and the meet up.
‘Most of the broadcasters use the same people year in and year out because we know the lie of the land, and we have a certain style appropriate to the event, so it’s lovely when we all get together and take pictures of each other like eejits.
‘There’s Peter Urban the German commentator — I’m very pally with him and then Graham (Norton) will come in and we’ll end up in a corner for a while, we all know each other. I’ll miss all that.’
With 21 years under his belt, Whelan has seen a vast array of standout moments from the show, some good and some very, very odd. He’s pulled them together for another show that’s being broadcast tonight, Marty’s Magical Eurovision Moments.
One of his favourite winners in recent years was the Portuguese 2017 entry from Salvador Sobral.
‘It was such a beautiful song, and he just stood there,’ explains Whelan. ‘His sister wrote it and there was no act, he just sang it and it remains one of the most beautiful songs in some years. But then you’ll have some loo-lah hanging out of a rafter, that’s how the Eurovision works.
‘So that’s what the show is about, behind the scenes stuff, the wacky moments, strange happenings, as well as featuring a fair amount of our winners.’
One past winner sure to be included is Dana, the wee girl from Derry who won the competition back in 1970 with All Kids of Everything. Yesterday morning she appeared on his breakfast radio show on Lyric FM, calling from Australia where she was visiting two of her children when flights between the two countries were cancelled. She and her husband will be staying there for the foreseeable future.
It was clear from the conversation that the singer still pays very close attention to the annual competition that helped make her a singing star.
‘The funny thing about it is that any of the people who represented
Ireland in the contest, they all have an interest,’ says Whelan. ‘For some of them it might be, “ah yeah I did that, whatever.” But others have a really strong interest and they wouldn’t miss the thing.
‘They are part of a club with very few members really, less than 50, it’s quite something. And they all have opinions about who should win and what we should do.’
One former winner made his opinions about the Irish music scene very clear this week. Johnny Logan stirred up something of an unholy, if entertaining, rumpus when he declared in an interview that fellow performer Dickie Rock lived in a ‘fantasy world,’ and was a ‘legend in his own head.’
Rock’s reply a day or two later was a threat to give Logan a ‘f***ing box.’ The two have since made up with public apologies to each other. It was a rather bizarre exchange, just before the 40th anniversary of Logan’s first Eurovision win for Ireland, the 1989 hit, What’s Another Year.
But if Whelan has any strong thoughts on the matter, he’s keeping them to himself.
‘I interviewed Johnny during the week and I said to him; “I’m not bringing up that business,” and he said; “Good.” It doesn’t bear thinking about, so we’ll leave it alone and we left it. You know, it’s silly, silly, silly. Whatever that was about. But it’s over, stuff happens.’
‘I believe the pair of them were trending (on Twitter),’ he adds with a loud laugh. ‘I don’t mind trending either.’
Whelan is well used to the some
‘Basically just me and a bottle of Baileys’ ‘You’d be lost without the mad stuff ’
times bizarre nature of the entertainment world, not least through his work with the Eurovision.
Because as well as the soulful singers like Salvador Sobral, there are the acts like Lordi, the Norwegian heavy metal band who won the contest in 2006 with their song, Hard Rock Hallelujah, while dressed like monster/zombies.
‘What I will say about the mad stuff is that you’d be lost without it,’ says Whelan. ‘That’s part and parcel of what the Eurovision is. If everyone came out in dinner suits and dresses and just sang a song, you’d go; “Really?”
‘We need Lordi, the absolute mayhem of that coupled with someone sitting on a stool singing a song. So as long as we have the pair of them, then we have a full entertainment, it would be very boring if everyone came out and looked straight forward.’
What is his favourite mad Eurovision moment?
‘When the Russians sent the grannies,’ he says of 2012’s Russian entry Buranovskiye Babushki — The Grannies from Buranovo who finished in second place.
‘There were half a dozen of them. You’d meet them back stage and be wondering, what are they doing here? Then they danced and they sang and you thought; “Why not?”
‘People come out in cages, or come out eating fire, it’s all to grab the attention, so that someone says: “I’ll vote for you.”
‘My son Tom, when he saw Lordi, he immediately texted me and said: “Dad, they’re going to win.” I said back; “You must be off your rocker.” So there you are. I think a lot of people voted for Lordi because they thought “That’s mad and it’s great.” So you never know what way it’s going to go.’
Whelan’s family, his wife Maria and their two children, Tom and Jessica, always watch the contest together at home, continuing the ritual Whelan shared with his own parents, Lily and Sean, at his childhood home in Raheny, north Dublin.
‘It was part and parcel of my life when I was young,’ he says. ‘I’m an only child, so it was me, Mam and Dad, the bar of Cadburys chocolate watching the Eurovision, the same way you’d watch the Rose of Tralee.
‘It’s part of who you are, I grew up with it, loved it. Mum would buy the RTE Guide and we’d tick off the entries. We all had a vote, it was just something we did.’
Apart from his Lyric show each weekday morning, for which he drives into the RTE studio at Donnybrook to present, Whelan has been spending the rest of the pandemic at home with his family. ‘Our children still live at home, Jessica is 29 and Tom is 26 and we haven’t had a fight yet!’ he laughs. ‘We’re very lucky that we get on so well. For the last few Saturday nights we’ve been dressing up, we’ve had a Mexican night, Italian night, a Country night with loads of Willie Nelson tunes and then the appropriate food of course. They’ll have a Eurovision night without me.’ There will be plenty of people across the country having a ‘Eurovision night’ tonight, probably more than usual thanks to the current ‘stay at home’ government guidelines. ‘It’s such an unusual event,’ Whelan says of the show’s ongoing popularity. ‘There’s nothing like it on television anywhere, it’s totally unique, there’s no bigger event on television apart from sports maybe, it’s the biggest thing on telly.’ So he doesn’t pay any attention to those who make fun of it, or say it’s rubbish; the Irish begrudgers as they’re often called? ‘I’m well past the begrudgers stage,’ he laughs. Indeed the contest is so unique, that US comedian and Hollywood star, Will Ferrell, felt compelled to make a movie about it, which is being released on Netflix. He appeared on the Graham Norton show last night to discuss how he became a Eurovision fan. ‘It happened about 20 years ago when we were visiting my wife’s family in Sweden,’ he said. ‘One evening her cousin suggested we watch it and we sat there for three hours straight. I was slack-jawed. ‘I couldn’t believe what I was watching. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. Everything you guys see —the spectacle, the humour – it was intoxicating.’
‘I’ve heard about the film alright,’ says Whelan. ‘And I saw him (Ferrell) in Lisbon about two years ago, he was filming and doing stuff, but I don’t know much about it. It’ll be interesting.’
Given the stress and tension the pandemic is causing Ireland’s collective psyche, the Eurovision might just be the perfect antidote for at least a few hours.
‘We do need cheering up,’ says Whelan. ‘That’s what we’re trying to do on the Lyric breakfast show as well. We need the facts but once we have them and try and be good and don’t act like eejits, we then need escapism and the Eurovision supplies that in spades.
‘I’m lucky that I’m a glass half full kind of fella, always idling on the side of positivity. I search it out, I feel you have to, otherwise, what is it that you’re doing?’
In the midst of all this positivity, however, Whelan does feel terribly sorry for Ireland’s entry, Leslie Roy, who has missed her chance to compete with her song, Story Of My Life.
‘I’m absolutely certain Lesley was going to qualify,’ he declares. ‘It was going down very well. The other commentators, who don’t tend to lie to you, were very impressed with it. I’m convinced we would have made it out of the semi-final.
‘But Leslie is fine talent, very impressive and it was a damn decent song, please God she’ll rise like a Phoenix very soon.’
There he goes again, Mr Positivity, telling us everything is going to be alright.