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Cross-dressing was a modest theme of the 2002 contest. The winners on
the night, Latvia, gave us a Ricky Martin character in high heels, who
slowly stripped off his white suit to reveal that he was in fact a
woman in a salmon-pink dress. The Bucks Fizz strip cliché ends
here. Slovenia mainly cross-dressed from the other direction with a trio of spangled male air-hostesses (backed by three resplendently white-suited captains (one of them female)). It's quite a well-assembled little number (one might imagine Beth Gibbons covering the verse, while the chorus is stuffed full of raunchy '80s brass stabs like some fantasy Wham! single). Cross-dressing with roast chickens, Sweden gave us a joyfully amateurish slab of banging joy from a sparkly bacofoil-clad female trio who know what it means to be rained on by men. Alas, the verse and the chorus seem never to have met until the night of the contest, perhaps selected by focus group (the most popular Verse was Verse B2, and the most popular Chorus was Chorus E7). But a few pooow!-ing noises and a good key-change do their best to cover up the dangerously inadequate weld. Our favourite cross-dressers of the night were Greece, who came as robot delivery-men from the future enjoying a game of laser-quest. It looks, on the face of it, like more or less the worst thing in the universe: part Boyzone, part Burzum, part Kraftwerk, part Galactic Symposium: one wonders if the main singer was drafted in from the pub at the last minute; his embarrassed grins and winks not really fitting in with the robot-soldier imagery. The most astonishing thing of all is that this is a Greek entry (not Finland... Greece!). The more you watch, the more the Kraftwerk electro-pop image crumbles into a gang of blokes struggling to keep a straight face while stomping and miming with keytars and generally feeling a bit self-conscious about it. Amazing. For each year's songs we apply our points in the 12-10-8 style of the modern contest, irrespective of how the voting functioned at the time. In brackets is the position the song came on the night:
Europe had France fifth, Romania ninth, Croatia eleventh, Israel twelfth, Belgium and Bosnia & Herzegovina joint-13th, Turkey 16th, Austria 18th, Macedonia 19th, Finland 20th, Germany 21st, Switzerland 22nd, Lithuania 23rd and Denmark 24th. |
![]() Our winner: Greece's robot army wants you! Sestre: flying the flag for Slovenia. Europe's winner: Latvian lesbian Latin. Sweden's bacofoil beauties.
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