The best thing about having a moderately successful blog covering major issues of world-wide concern (keeping chickens, playing bowls etc.) is that it does tend to prompt a trickle of quirky and interesting things to happen. The trickle is a little more trickley than it was during the mad days of ‘OMG! OMG! People having blogs is the next big thing!’ but just when you think life has settled down into some sort of normality, an email pops up from the host of Slovenia TV’s Eurovision Song Contest coverage.
So, my new friend Klemen Slakonja (which is Slovenian for ‘Graham Norton’) thought he’d liven up the Slovenian domestic Eurovision auditions show by using the nation’s entire annual TV production budget to create an all-singing, all-dancing video parody of Vladimir Putin, president of Evil Russia. The fact that this exists means that Slovenia is my new favourite country – for reasons less about Mr Putin himself than a simple what a magnificently bloodymindedly mad thing to decide to do. It has already gone viral (as I understand it) on the YouTube, with all sorts of cheery comments below the line along the lines of ‘I am from Russia and you should be afraid’ and ‘we are so going to nuke your country.’
I would like us to be a country that would undertake this sort of lunacy, during a prime-time light-entertainment broadcast put together to somehow represent the nation. But I can’t really see it happening.
Rather than do the sensible thing, which would be to remove the video, change his name, stock up on anti-polonium cream and go and hide in a cupboard, Klemen is approaching Western powers (like me) to try to get more people to watch it, along with his other stuff, some of which is in English and some of which is in Slovenian. I found the stuff in Slovenian to be doubly enjoyable, as I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but it gave me the impression that somebody was being annoyed, somewhere. I’m currently looking for Slovenian evening classes, but there appears to be a gap in the market here in Norfolk.
I’m surely going to sing “Putin, Putout” for the rest of the evening. Remarkable!