|
By Michael Tarm
 So you say there’s nothing even vaguely subversive about the
Eurovision Song Contest, that it’s a wonderfully meaningless gala of glitz?
Karl Pihelgas begs to differ.
During Soviet communist rule, when
Eurovision was a symbol of the carefree capitalist West, he and 12 other closet fans would quietly gather to watch it.
“It was one way to defy Soviet rule, a way to see the West, to feel you were part of the West,” said the mild-mannered retiree, sporting a sweater and thick bifocals during an
interview.
Pihelgas, 71, wasn’t by any means the only Estonian who tuned in—though he was distinguished by his passion to watch no matter what. He and the members of the
Eurovision Club he founded
 gathered to watch every year for 35 years straight.
That opportunity came thanks to Finland, 90 kilometers across the Baltic
Sea; Finnish television waves just reached the Estonian coast. Northern Estonia, including Tallinn, was the only place in the Soviet empire where you could see Western TV.
(This leak in the Iron Curtain wasn’t accessible to either Latvians or Lithuanians, who
are farther away from Finland and weren’t able to watch Western
television directly.)
To receive the broadcasts, you had to affix a homemade antenna to your roof and point it north. If you didn’t install a special gadget inside the TV, there was no sound.
“You had to want to watch,” Pihelgas, who worked as an electrician at
Estonian Radio, said from his two-room Tallinn apartment. “I wanted to.”
It became an obsession.
The start of his love affair with Western pop came as a boy in Estonia, when local radio broadcasts featured music from across Europe and the United States.
But the Red Army invaded when he was 10, and one of their first acts was to confiscate all radios. When repressions eased after Stalin died,
Pihelgas got his hands on as many radios as he could. In the early 1960s, he bought his first television.
Leading up to the show each spring, he’d monitor Finnish
Eurovision ads, carefully jotting down the names of performers. He’d pound out lists on a crude typewriter and distribute them to the dozen members of the unsanctioned Song Contest
club.
He didn’t mention the ritual at work on the off chance it’d raise suspicions. Watching
Eurovision wasn’t likely to get him in trouble since most Estonians in range of Finnish TV did watch. But officials frowned on unsanctioned clubs of any kind.
He still keeps the meticulous catalogues of each
Song Contest since 1966 on wispy, faded-yellow paper, stored on his living room shelves like so many love letters.
That first year, Austria’s Odo Jürgens won singing
Merci Cherie. It was also the year Britain’s Kenneth McKellar famously sang in a kilt. He came in ninth, as Pihelgas had scrawled carefully on his makeshift chart for that year.
The executive producer of
the 2002 Song Contest, 55-year-old Estonian Juhan Paadam, said he never recalled Soviet authorities denouncing
Eurovision. They conspicuously ignored it.
When the opportunity arose, he said he also watched it with glee.
“Eurovision was a window on the Western world, absolutely,” he said. “Maybe it didn’t
set musical trends, but it wasn’t unimportant either. For us, it wasn’t only a chance to hear Western pop. We could see how people interacted and dressed.”
The Soviets considered jamming Finnish TV to counter what they saw as insidious Western influences—but eventually abandoned the idea as unpractical.
It wasn’t the likes of Eurovision they had foremost in their sights.
What worried censors far more were Finnish grocery store commercials that drove home the contrast between shortage-ridden Soviet life and Western abundance.
Worse, from the official perspective, was that Estonians could stay abreast of world affairs. They followed the challenges to communist rule in Poland in 1980 on the Finnish nightly news.
“Estonians were the only ones in the Soviet Union who knew that Lech Welesa had a moustache,” recent Estonian President Lennart Meri once famously explained.
Soviet rulers would hardly have seen the often schmaltzy, ultra-light
Eurovision as introducing anything in the way of revolutionary ideas. Anti-establishment groups like the
Sex Pistols or even David Bowie were readily blacklisted.
In part to offer a socialist alternative to
Eurovision, Paadam said the television network of the Warsaw Pact countries, OIRT, even began staging an annual song contest
of its own in Poland.
But people here—who had always remained firmly rooted in the West, in mind and spirit if not in body—paid it little heed.
Eurovision had far greater allure.
Local bands would sometimes even do cover versions of winning
Eurovision songs, with Estonian lyrics.
“Estonia was more liberal than elsewhere in the Soviet Union, so they could usually get away with it,” said Paadam.
An exception was when someone recorded a rendition of the 1978 winning song from Israel, a country that was high up on the Kremlin’s list of enemies.
“That didn’t go over too well,” recalled Paadam. “There were calls from the Central Committee apparently. There was some heat on that one.”
Seeing Estonia take part in
Eurovision for the first time in 1993 was a dream come true for Pihelgas.
Watching a crisp, clear picture on local TV—plus never having to climb the roof to adjust the aerial—was an added bonus.
To his delight, Estonia wasted little time making a splash at the
Contest. (Paadam suggested that Estonians’ familiarity with Eurovision via Finnish TV partly accounted for their early successes compared to other ex-communist
countries.)
That first year Estonia did come in a dismal 24th out of 25. But since then, it’s been one of the best performing countries of all—placing fifth, eight, twelfth, sixth, fourth and then, in 2001, first.
“Estonia actually winning was something I never imagined would happen in my wildest dreams,” said Pihelgas, shaking his head.
“Unbelievable.”
Ironically, the surprise victory by Estonian duo Tanel Padar and Dave Benton marked the end of his
Song Contest Club.
Pihelgas said club members decided last year to disband it for good. He said too many of the original members had
died and, he figured, he was also getting too old.
He still spends much of his time listening to and recording pop music from the radio. And he still keeps his boxy, decades-old radios in working order, stacking them neatly around his tiny living
room—a virtual monument to a bygone era.
But he was determined to have one last
Eurovision hurrah.
He and a few other old club members bought tickets to the 2002
Contest dress rehearsal the day before the final, he explained, reaching for a drawer and proudly pulling out his
pink-green ticket.
He watched the finals on his television at home.
—Copyright CITY PAPER-The Baltic States
|
