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The miracle of Eurovision is how much it has legitimised itself over the last decade and a half. For years, the song contest was the laughing stock of Europe, a toe-curling night on which all the continent’s fifth-rate novelty acts would gather and bing-bam-boom themselves to death while the rest of Europe looked on and jeered.
But look at it now. By carefully repositioning itself, and by encouraging countries to submit relevant, modish entries, Eurovision has transformed into the party of the year. People love Eurovision – and not ironically, either. At a time of growing international strife – the sort of strife that it was designed to combat – Eurovision represents a moment of unity. It is, in short, in the shape of its life. It would take something spectacular to mess it up.
Reader, something spectacular has happened. Yesterday, Eurovision introduced the world to Lumo, its new mascot. Eurovision has never had a mascot before, because it doesn’t need one. But for this year’s contest, in Basel, Switzerland, a competition was held to design one. And the winner was Lumo.
According to Eurovision’s official website, “Lumo is said to embody the unstoppable power of music. Its untamed curly hair blazes like flames, dancing wildly to the beat and reflecting the electrifying euphoria of the Eurovision song contest. With its bright colours, it illustrates the heat of emotions – from fervent enthusiasm to the warming comfort of shared experiences. Its big bright eyes, mouth poised to burst into song and its expressive hands make Lumo a joyous ambassador of musical diversity and togetherness.” Full marks to those of you who got through all that.
In reality, Lumo is terrifying. It is a multicoloured heart with hair that looks like Michael Fabricant at a Jessica Rabbit dressing-up party. It has enormous bug eyes and the sort of oddly full lips you really only see on homemade pornography fan-art forums. Its arms and legs are weird, amorphous blobs. It looks like a normal mascot that has been passed back and forth between the teleportation machines from The Fly, if the machines had previously been contaminated with lumps of raw meat and a few handfuls of pubic hair.
The press release says that Lumo will walk the streets of Basel come Eurovision time (the first semi-final is on 13 May). Previously, this sort of thing has been done via billboards, but clearly the organisers don’t think that went far enough. A billboard can’t follow you around, squealing and leaping, like the most hellish anxiety dream of your life. A billboard can’t terrify you while you are walking home from a night out. A billboard – and I’m truly sorry for putting this mental image into your head, but it is undeniable – doesn’t resemble the result of a drunken one-night stand between Mick Hucknall and the Crazy Frog.
Obviously, the big question is why Eurovision thought it needed a mascot in the first place. Mascots are usually used in sport, so perhaps there is an element of the Olympics at play here; after all, over time, an Olympic mascot becomes intertwined with its host city. There was the Seoul tiger, the Munich dachshund, London’s all-seeing dildo. Whatever they are, these mascots become lasting representations of the city in question. Presumably, the hope is that whoever wins Eurovision this year will create a mascot to roam their streets in 2026.
Well, don’t. Eurovision does not need this. It’s doing perfectly fine on its own. The beauty of Eurovision is that its fans have built the contest in their own image. They don’t need something – let alone something that looks like the result of the ChatGPT prompt “please ruin my day” – to do that for them. Eurovision is for the people, not for sentient hearts with bizarrely sexy mouths.
But perhaps there will be an unintended consequence to the invention of Lumo. Europe is more divided than it has been in decades. A continental war, once a distant possibility, looks more likely by the day. But nothing unites people like a common enemy. If everyone, of every nationality, were to join together to hate Lumo as it deserves to be hated, there is no telling what we could achieve together.
