Unbelievably – Ukraine has just leaped past Australia, and won

Would you have thought it – a massive telephone vote. And Ukraine is the winner. It must be the first time ever in Eurovision history that a song about death and the forced marches of ethnic minorities in World War II has even featured in the contest, let alone won it.

The winning singer, Jamala, is wearing what looks to be a homemade dress in blue crepe, with hair she put together quickly herself before rushing onto the stage. No weird dancer, no millions spent, no entourage of 200 Taghna Lkollers, no award-winning song-writers or dress designers, and still she won.

Malta got one of the lowest votes from the tele-voting public – just 16 points compared to 300+ for Ukraine – which tells you that both song and singer had next to zero public appeal. I was going to write something about why that was going to happen, this afternoon, but then that storm in a teacup broke out when an unreconstructed Maltese man used an ill-advised word, and I thought I’d leave it until after the show, rather than give those nasty pieces of work in the ‘Joseph iz di bast and di udders dey are bitter’ camp something else to whine about.

But in a nutshell – they made Ira Losco look like a guest at a Lebanese wedding crossed with an Italian porn star on a night out. The ‘shell’ bra cups in sequins, the thigh-high slit, the skyscraper heels, the BRONZE make-up: it was everything that is wrong with Maltese Taghna Lkoll taste in what women should look like to be “faqa” and “sexy hi” and “bomba” and “bauefitul inside and out”. To the rest of Europe, that’s called tacky, the trailer-trash idea of dressing up. The key is, either go whacky and funky, or keep it simple.

The sad thing is that Miss Losco would have been a whole lot better off with a minimally made up face and wearing a simple shift, without that terribly ageing get-up and make-up. As one man tweeted, I think from Britain: #malta has a vibe of ‘your-mother’s-fruity-friend’. Exactly, bang on one: she looked like somebody’s divorced mother trying to pick up the lads.

The organisers (and most of the public, I suspect) are still stuck in a time-warp where Miss Losco is 20 and are forgetting that she is now 35 or thereabouts. Put her in a Lebanese-style sequined dress with thick make-up and a typically Maltese woman that age immediately looks to be in her 40s. The irony of life is that the older a woman gets, the more ageing lots of make-up, over-styled hair and ‘sexy’ clothes are.

You just wish those stardust Eurovision camp-as-a-row-of-tents (even when they’re not) Maltese men jostling to get a winner would simply get a life instead. How sad are they.

Ira Losco is a nice woman, smiley and friendly and all that. It’s hard not to like her. But I think lots of Maltese people need to understand what the Village Venus effect is. This business with Miss Losco is a classic example of that.

One of the daftest tweets this afternoon was by the Labour Party’s television station or perhaps PBS – I forget which, and nowadays it’s a case of same difference anyway. Ira Losco is leading by example, representing Malta and furthering her career while having a baby, they said – or words to that effect. Furthering her career? At the Eurovision Song Contest? After 16 years of being a local singer in Malta? At 35?

This is what I mean about Maltese people being cut off from reality. The world is not waiting for a 34-year-old local singer from Malta to make it big out of Sliema or Valletta or wherever. The only way in which singers make it big is by leaving their comfort zone at 18, squatting down in some bedsit in a big city in a big country, and putting in the hard graft, living from hand to mouth, singing in bars, going to auditions and putting themselves about. Ira Losco was never going to make it because she never wanted to do all that. And now it’s too late. Face facts: in the pop market, at 35 you’re an old lady, not waiting to be discovered. Malta’s has just got to be one of the most ridiculous and childish societies on earth, all magical thinking.

And they’re shocked all over Facebook, the result of the Village Venus effect coupled with the rumours that have been going round that Magic Joseph has fixed it. The only thing that Magic Joseph has been fixing is probably offshore.

Nice and simple – and hundreds of votes ahead of Malta.