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Konrad Werner: Lena vs. Lena

In case you were getting anxious because you've not been keeping up with the latest Lena news, Konrad watched the first semi-final of the Lena vs. Lena PRO 7 extravaganza for you. And then he had a brilliant idea.

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Photo by chaouki (Flickr CC)

It’s a bit of a slow news week, huh? Nothing much to talk about, except the death of a brutal dictatorship, the emphatic exposure of western hypocrisy, and the final unravelling of the world’s sanity. According to the Guardian, Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq “was ‘surprised’ to see camels.” But then he realized there was a completely rational explanation: “They must have come from the pyramids complex and it could have been camel owners upset about the effect of the protests on tourism.” I was wondering what it was all about. Fucking hell – it seems you can measure the decline of a regime by the absurdity of its lies.

Anyway, I spent the week watching Lena videos, which is not as easy as it sounds, as there are a lot of them. Poor girl, she’s been getting some rotten press. In case you’ve been distracted by the birth of the new world order in the Middle East, let me fill you in – Lena is currently in the middle of choosing the song with which she will defend her Eurovision title. And we are allowed to watch. You’ll recall that on the night of her triumph, her creepier-by-the-minute mentor Stefan Raab promised that she would be back next year. And well, I assure you he’s kept his word.

As a few newspapers noted, the current TV extravaganza (three 90-minute shows, in which we, the German people, are allowed to choose from 12 Lena songs to find “Our Song for Deutschland“) is a bit like a GDR election. In fact, German papers definitely found their funny bone at the perky teenager’s expense – “Lena beats Lena with an emphatic 3-all,” parped Die Zeit, for example.

I thought this was slightly unfair. She was, after all, wearing different clothes some of the time. But while it was reassuring to find that despite her meteoric career Lena has kept her inability to pronounce the word “today,” my over-riding thought throughout the interminable evening was: “Why can’t she just do “Satellite”? It’s miles better than this turgid stream of warm donkey piss.”

And then I had my brilliant idea. Is there actually a Eurovision rule that says you can’t enter the same song? Instead of this absurd charade, what they should have done is a competition where different Germans sing “Satellite” as our song for Düsseldorf 2011 – including Lena herself. She would obviously have a good chance of winning, but at least there’d be a credible opposition to keep the UN inspectors happy. It would be more of a Zimbabwe-type election than a GDR one.