If you had challenged AI to come up with a “classic” Eurovision song it might well have come up with last Bulgaria’s winner, Bangaranga by Dara.

It ticks all the Eurovision boxes, not least the one that demands a meaningless phrase repeated ad infinitum until you can’t get it out of your head.

See also: La La La (Spain 1968), Boom Bang-A-Bang (UK 1969), Ding-A-Dong (Netherlands 1975), Boom Boom Boomerang (Austria 1977) and Baila El Chiki-Chiki (Spain 2008).

Dara, representing Bulgaria, also took the contest’s tradition of artificiality all the way to her implausibly sculpted balloon-like decolletage and lips.

And, like Bucks Fizz with their skirt-ripping gimmick, she threw in a novelty dance by a troupe of dancers that was simultaneously complex and completely bonkers and had more in common with St Vitus than Sadlers Wells.

All that and a song that contains four or five different styles, from overblown ballad to Europop, via a hip-hop-lite section, a choral bit, some military drumming, and a banging techno-adjacent chorus set to the single-word chant “Bangaranga.”

I had hoped to miss Eurovision altogether by going to the cinema – and I highly recommend Carla Simón’s film Romería – and getting home well after 11pm. But of course Eurovision overran, as it always does.

Consequently, I watched the audience vote, which suddenly catapulted Israel (whose presence led at least five countries to boycott the contest) from nowhere to the top spot. 

So I was there watching Israel “overcelebrate” with their country’s flag, with all that represents today, just as the final vote came in… rocketing Bulgaria, and Dara, to their first ever triumph.

That, I hope you will agree, is enough in itself to celebrate; hence today’s post of a song whose title is just one letter away from the first ever reggae song, Bangarang. I wonder if Dara is aware of that.