I’m a fan of Julia Zemiro, host of SBS’s RocKwiz, so it was a sublime pleasure to see her play the “beautiful and beguiling” co-host Bronya, “the face of modern Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in the Eurovision send-up stage show Eürobeat on Thursday night.
Julia is Bronya and, with the delightfully self-conscious Sergei (Jason Geary), brings us the the stilted, tacky presentation we come to know and love from the “real” contest. The rest of the cast captures perfectly the gamut of eurotrash — from the UK’s cheesey duo Rayne & Sheiner’s I Love To Love To Love (Love) and Russian boy-band KGBoys with Ice Queen (“She’s frozen my heart.”) to Iceland’s Björk-esque Gert Grollmersdetter and Love Ballad #3A.
Many good words have already been written about this show, including an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. And I agree, this is all great fun. Yes, plenty of jokes about goats, and turnips. But this is Eurovision: cliché is compulsory.