Eurovision hits meet Liverpool humour in Jonathan Harvey's A Thong For Europe
- Published first on BBC Entertainment.
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| Jonathan Harvey wrote his new show, A Thong For Europe, in a matter of weeks |
The
night Liverpool won the right to host the Eurovision Song Contest,
playwright Jonathan Harvey had an idea to pen a musical for his home
city featuring hits from Eurovision history. Six months on, A Thong For
Europe could rival the main event.
When
the host city for this year's Eurovision was announced by Graham Norton
last October, two bidding locations were in the running.
"I
never thought Liverpool would get it," Harvey recalls. "A mate of mine,
her mate works for the BBC, and they reckoned they had inside
information that Glasgow would get it.
"So I told everyone, 'We're not going to get it.'"
His mate of a mate was wrong.
Airbnb inspiration
Harvey, a Eurovision fanatic as well as an acclaimed writer, immediately thought about the potential to marry his two passions.
He already had a half-formed idea about a woman who rented out her home to film crews. "But it wasn't quite right," Harvey says.
"Then
on the night when it was announced, and they said Liverpool, I texted
Stephen [Fletcher, director] and said, 'I think we've got our story
now'.
"Immediately,
people were putting their houses on Airbnb for extortionate amounts of
money, and suddenly you couldn't get a hotel room."
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| In A Thong For Europe, a woman called Lulu must scatter her mother's ashes on the Eurovision stage |
His
show is a riotous, camp comedy about Lulu, named after the UK's 1969
Eurovision winner, who rents out a room to the fictional republic of
Balkania's 2023 contestant.
Plays
can take years to get from concept to the stage. Musicals usually take
even longer. But Liverpool's Royal Court theatre was keen to join the
Eurovision celebrations and gave his idea the go-ahead within days, the
writer says.
"They were building the set before I'd written the script. It was great.
"I'd
never worked like that before, where you think, I'd better get on with
writing the script because it's going to be on soon. Usually there are
so many hoops to jump through to get a play on that it's quite soul
destroying.
"But this has been such a fast turnaround. I haven't really caught my breath."
Merseyside
pop star Sonia, who represented the UK in 1993, also makes an
appearance. Not the real Sonia - but an actress playing her in a
balaclava, supposedly so she doesn't get recognised by fans.
Harvey
says the idea for a fake, masked Sonia came from a US TV show. "I saw a
sitcom in America once where Cher had come to stay at these people's
house while she was recovering from a facelift. It was literally just an
actress with bandages on her face, and she never spoke. It really made
me laugh."
In
A Thong For Europe, Lulu wants to scatter her mother's ashes on this
year's Eurovision stage, after she meets an unfortunate end in a hot tub
in her European flag underwear.
"I
mean, it's a daft show about the Eurovision," Harvey says. "If I was
going to be writing a really important, serious piece about the state of
the nation, then I wouldn't expect to write it in such a quick space of
time.
"The
hardest thing was choosing the songs because I know all of the
Eurovision songs, so it's like, what are the favourites that people will
want to be tapping their feet to or singing along to?"
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Brotherhood of Man's 1976 winning hit is among the Eurovision tunes in the musical |
He's chosen classics ranging from Brotherhood of Man's Save Your Kisses For Me to Conchita Wurst's Rise Like a Phoenix.
Harvey
remembers watching Brotherhood of Man win Eurovision in 1976 when he
was eight. He soon became intoxicated by the contest's exotic cocktail
of cross-cultural pop and kitsch glamour.
"I
think it was that scale and the scope of it that felt impossibly
exciting to me. It was sort of otherworldly, with lots of things I
didn't really understand."
A
couple of years later, on Eurovision morning, he asked fellow members
of the Liverpool Penguins swimming club whether they were excited. He
was dismayed to be met by blank looks.
"And that's when I realised that I was quite different from other people."
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Conchita Wurst's winning song from 2014 also features in the new musical |
After
starting to write plays in his teens, Harvey made his breakthrough with
1993 play Beautiful Thing, a romantic comedy about two gay teenagers.
That
had a tight deadline, too. Harvey was a teacher and only had his summer
holiday. He wrote it in the first two weeks, typed it up in the second
two weeks, then found an agent in the final fortnight.
In
1995, Harvey wrote his first Eurovision-themed play, set at a
Eurovision party and named Boom Bang-A-Bang after Lulu's winning song.
The
contest also cropped up in his late-1990s sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme,
when a character was said to have represented the UK with a song called
Dee Do Dee Do Dum Dum.
Then
his 2009 sitcom Beautiful People recreated the 1998 contest, complete
with a guest appearance from that year's winner, Dana International.
Harvey
has also tackled more serious subject matter. He has worked for
Coronation Street since 2004, and says the soap has made him disciplined
and focused as a writer.
"The first episode I did was about Todd Grimshaw coming out. I found that really easy," he says.
"Then for my second episode I had to write a scene between two gangsters, and I'd never written two gangsters before."
He
was suddenly filled with doubt. "Then you go, you know what, I've got
to do it because it's going to be on screen in eight weeks' time. So you
just have to get on and write it and hope it's OK.
"So
there's that element of not being intimidated by anything - to go, OK,
they need the show by then. No-one's going to write it for me."
He
was keen to work at the Royal Court, which has found success by staging
stories - usually Liverpool-set comedies - that appeal to a local
audience.
"I
think it must be the only theatre in the country that regularly does
new play after new play, that sells the number of tickets they do,"
Harvey says. "They really know their market."
A Thong For Europe will be the venue's 100th original show since it restarted making its own productions in 2006.
"They
have regulars who'll go because they know what they're in for. And I've
long wanted to see if I could achieve that too, and find what those
ingredients are."
Scouse humour
He adds: "I think this might be a little bit camper than what they're used to. But it should fit the bill with the comedy."
Like most Royal Court shows, A Thong For Europe has a strong streak of Scouse humour.
Some
of that may be lost on European visitors who come to Liverpool and have
a spare evening for some Eurovision-themed entertainment.
"Hopefully they'll enjoy it," Harvey says. "It's an absolute celebration of the contest. We'll see!"
A Thong For Europe runs at the Royal Court in Liverpool from 21 April to 27 May.
All the build-up, insights and analysis is explored each week on a BBC podcast called Eurovisioncast.
Eurovisioncast is available on BBC Sounds, or search wherever you get your podcasts from.
