If you’ve ever wondered why the Western world put the United States in charge of popular music some time in the second half of the 20th century, have a look at the Eurovision Song Contest.

For while the folk music of that continent, with its goatskin bagpipes, accordion solos, oom-pah-pah bands and bouzouki echoes of Homeric prehistory, may be worth preserving from an ethnographic point of view, its commercial popular music culture is pretty bad, to make a sweeping but nevertheless valid, generalisation, and always has been.

This year’s Eurovision featured the usual overdose of over-emoting songsters from small nations rarely heard from outside the qualifying stages of the soccer World Cup.

The songs were mostly overwrought ballads of impossible love or fist-pumping anthems of cultish self-actualisation, although the winner, Israel’s Netta, channelled #MeToo with her song, Toy.