I never used to care about the Eurovision Song Contest because it’s just sugary pop music with too much flash and slutty outfits (not really in a good way). But ever since 2006 when a fully costumed Finnish hard rock band won, and in 2007 the second place went to a campy Ukranian crossdresser singing in a Russian-pseudo German mishmash language stole the show, I keep abreast of the finals hoping something outrageous will happen again.

The Dutch have had no luck in ages. They were knocked out of the semi-finals in 2006, 2007 and 2008, their best score in recent years, and now instead of sending pretty young women who can sing, they are sending in the “big guns”: three ‘older’ men, namely singers Gordon, Rene Froger and Jeroen van der Boom who call themselves The Toppers.

They playbacked on television yesterday instead of actually singing, which caused a commotion in the press, the number they sang was possibly written by some woman and not Gordon although she can’t prove it, and many experts agree the song is not very good, which is Dutch for “it sucks.”

It’s one big string of clichés (in English) and it screams midlife crisis. The idea of sending experienced artists is good, but if they can’t sing live, they are dead in the water. Kudoz to their big and beautiful backup singers, which is a good bold move.

A quick tour of the contestants shows a young, blond Belgian-Turkish woman representing Turkey, Hadise (love that dual citizenship), while Slovenia has some elegant string quartet called Quartissimo with a young, blond female singer. Then, there is also the famous young enough and blond enough Patricia Kaas who will represent France and cannot possibly do worse than the Netherlands.

Am I the only one who thinks that singing the words “love will make us glow in the dark” in Moscow is really funny?