
Ester Peony
On a Sunday
And so to another of those pesky Eastern European countries that Wogan started off gently parodying and latterly openly hated before being bundled off to his nursing home.
I seem to spend half my life on social media or round the dinner table at Christmas convincing people that Romanians are not here to sponge off us or take all the social housing or block up the M4. For crying out loud. A massive majority of European immigrants are here to work, paying taxes that you try to dodge and doing jobs we need for a wage that you would never take, leaving behind family and friends to build a better life.
They reward my loyalty in different ways. In 2016 they tried to get away without paying the EBU so got kicked out. In 2017 they entered some yodelling fused with rap. Last year they entered some Humans singing a song called "Goodbye" which was exactly the reaction elicited from televoters.
For fairly obvious and justifiable reasons, this went down like a cup of sick with the Romanian Eurovision fan community and indeed the broadcaster, who then overcooked the pudding a bit and hastily revised the rules of the final so that there would be seven judges, six of which were humans (not Humans) and one of which was the result of the public vote.
The problem is that they then obviously forgot to tell the massed experts who to vote for instead, and so instead of Bella Santiago we have been gifted with this colossal megaturd of a song, which they're trying to rescue with some lazy vampire imagery.
"Everything happens on Sundays", she says in the press blurb. "My selection in Romania's national final was also Sunday. This day is considered a happy day". So why is the song so utterly irredeemably miserable? "But my song talks about the people who suffer on Sundays". Sure.
Romania! I ask you. Do you remember that time when Ovi off of Romania put his head through a piano toilet seat and started tinkling with the rim?