Fans of hopeless music face a terrible dilemma tomorrow night. On BBC1, hopeless musicians from all around the continent will get together to honk and squawk in the Eurovision Song Contest.
But at the same time on ITV1, a group of old hopeless musicians will be together, willing to flush the last of their dignity down the toilet in order for people to like them again. That’s right, it can only be the Hit Me Baby One More Time Grand Final.
hecklerspray and Betfair.com are going to take you by the hand and lead you through each contender, giving you their profiles and special betting odds. Ready? Good.
Shakin Stevens – Elvis is dead. But imagine if he wasn’t. That’s Shakin Stevens. Or, to be more accurate, imagine if Elvis was dead, but a freak lightning bolt hit his grave and resuscitated him into a flaky, stumbling, confused Zombie Elvis. That’s Shakin Stevens. Famously completely forgot all the words to Trouble by Pink in his round. And still won. A fan favourite. Current odds – 6/7
Chesney Hawkes – No other competitor is riding the irony vote
as much as Chesney. Nobody really likes him, nobody ever really liked
him to begin with. He says that John Lennon is his biggest musical influence. You see, The One And Only was really a raw screaming plea for his mother to love him. But probably only in Chesney’s head. Covered She’s The One. Current odds – 13/5
Hue And Cry – Two shiny-headed Scottish weeble-brothers who
performed one of the most jaw-droppingly rubbish cover versions the
world has ever seen when they re-jiggled Beyonce‘s Crazy In Love into three minutes of hooting turd. Again, they still somehow managed to win. Current odds – 8/1
Shalamar – They won their round, but their competition was Jordan Knight, Junior, Sabrina and Rozalla.
If we dressed a goose up as a country gent and shot ballbearings up
it’s anus with a peashooter to make it sing, we’d have won the round
too. They did do a half-decent cover, to be fair, of Hey Ya. Current odds – 12/1
Carol Decker – Big faced ginger singer who we were millimetres away from liking until we saw a TV advert for a Best Of T’Pau
CD the other day. Then we were reminded what an excretable lot of toss
T’Pau actually sang, and we changed our minds. She covered Superstar by Jamelia. In a non-T’Pau style. That’s a good thing. Current odds – 15/1
Tiffany – When you’re young, your brains are undeveloped, so you like things that aren’t good. You think Captain Pugwash is brilliant. Then you grow up and realise it was crap. We had a similar moment when I Think We’re Alone Now,
a song which people remember to be beautifully sung, was roared out
like an angry dragon by an old woman on the telly. She covered a Girls Aloud song, too. Current odds – 21/2
911 – Named after the number Americans should call when
they’ve heard so much of this group they decide to set themselves on
fire. Three tiny men who all look like one of Ant and Dec, dancing and wanting to be Take That really, really badly. They covered an S Club 7 song. Current odds – 26/1
That’s all of them. Of course, so much of the competition depends on
the covers round. Hopefully they’ll all have to sing something
different to the qualifying rounds, just to add a touch more
viewer-friendly desperation and fear into their performances.
To see how the Hit Me Baby One More Time odds list looks, head over to the Special Bets section of Betfair.com,
and get betting. Remember, if you vote for them by text, you’re to
blame for them being on telly more when they win. But if you just bet
on them, you could win money and it’d all be guilt-free.
[story by Stuart Heritage]
