Brussels, that well-known comedy goldmine

The EU is a lot of things. But is it funny? And would Europe be a better place if we *could* find it funny? This week we're talking to Lise Witteman, one of the co-founders of live comedy show The Schuman Show, about finding humour in the Brussels machine. We're also talking about Pope Francis' face-off with Viktor Orbán and the Italian tourism campaign that spawned a thousand memes.

Do you live in Europe, and do you enjoy this podcast? If so, you can celebrate democracy and fund our show at the same time, by signing up to join the Capital of European Democracy jury. It only takes a few clicks and it's a huge help to us! Sign up here: https://join.capitalofdemocracy.eu/europeanspod

You can find out more about the Schuman Show at https://www.schumanshow.eu.

The final visual version of the episodes in our series This Is What A Generation Sounds Like, produced by our friends at Are We Europe, can be found here. 

This week's Isolation Inspiration: The Allusionist's Eurovision episodes and 'The Curious Case of Columbo's Message to Romania'

Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast and would like to help us keep making it, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few bucks a month at ⁠patreon.com/europeanspodcast⁠ (many currencies are available). You can also help new listeners find the show by ⁠leaving us a review⁠ or giving us five stars on Spotify. 

Producers: Katy Lee and Wojciech Oleksiak 

Mixing and mastering: Wojciech Oleksiak

Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

INTRODUCTION - 0’22”

KATY: How are you feeling, Dominic?

DOMINIC: Why are you whispering?

K: I'm whispering because a little bird tells me that someone went quite big on King’s Day last week, and I thought you might still be feeling a little delicate.

D: Hey!

K: Can you explain this unruly behaviour?

D: I usually ignore King’s Day. For people who don't know, King’s Day is like a huge national holiday where the whole country goes a bit bananas. There are, like, flea markets everywhere, but also, day-long street parties, which is just a bit mad. I didn't have too wild a time, I just went out into it for a bit. I didn't get drunk, Katy.

K: Did you have one more peppermint tea than usual?

D: Yeah, exactly. I'm a singer.

K: I thought British lads had been banned from Amsterdam. They should take away your residency permit.

D: I don't have a residency permit. I'm German, remember?

K: Damn, they can’t kick you out.

D: But yeah, I actually decided that King’s Day can be quite fun. I've always been a bit reluctant to embrace it because of the whole, like, royal family celebration thing, which I find a bit weird. But I kind of understand it now. The way I managed to embrace King’s Day was by realising that it's just like Gay Pride, but for straight people.

K: Oh! 

D: There's something nice about a moment where everyone decides to let go of loads of societal rules and just treat the city in a completely different way.

K: Our producer Katz posted an Instagram story about how one of the wildest things that happens is that people can sell things on the street without paying tax, which I just thought was the most hilariously Dutch way of letting loose I can think of.

D: it is a bit wild, yeah. Have you been going crazy in Paris too?

K: I haven't, although we're recording this on May Day, and just down the road things are going quite crazy with the Labour Day protests. So apologies if you hear any loud bangs. But other than that, I'm good. Like most journalists in Paris, I've been mostly entertaining myself over the last couple of days by reading extracts from the finance minister's new novel, which has some quite interesting, quote unquote, erotic passages in it.

D: Oh, wow.

K: It's incredibly badly written. I almost want to launch a follow up podcast to My Dad Wrote A Porno called My Finance Minister Wrote A Porno. It's so bad. There’s this one line that I thought was especially funny where this woman says, ‘Can you see how big my breasts are today?’ Like, why would they be bigger than yesterday?

D: No, but that's… that's a thing, right..?

K: Is it?!

D: If you're pregnant, or…

K: Not bigger than yesterday!

D: Not like day-to-day, maybe, but…

K: I think we should move on. Before we get into this week's show, I wanted to draw everyone's attention to something new that we're trying out, which is transcripts for our episodes – so, written versions of these podcasts. To be honest with you, it's something that we should have done a lot sooner, because it's something that makes our show a lot more accessible to all kinds of different people. But I'm really glad that we're doing it now. So for example, if you are hard of hearing, or English isn't your first language and you want to read along while we talk, I hope it's something that you find helpful, and you will find the transcripts on the episode pages of our website. What are we talking about this week?

D: This week, we're going to be talking about a group of comedians and writers in Brussels who are using the European institutions and European politicians as material for their comedy shows. We were rather intrigued by this impulse to find the funny in Brussels, so we decided to call up Lise Witteman, one of the comedy writers for The Schuman Show. That is coming up later. But first, it's time for Good Week, Bad Week.

GOOD WEEK - 03’53”

K: Who's had a good week?

D: I'm giving Good Week, pretty tentatively, to Pope Francis, who's head of the Catholic Church. 

K: Thank you for the reminder.

D: Just in case you don't know. Because he is receiving some praise for his trip to Hungary last weekend. I'm not saying that it was by any means a disaster for populist nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, but Orbán didn't manage to always get his way during Pope Francis's three-day trip to Hungary. And for that, Pope Francis is getting some praise. And I think, therefore, I can ordain him with a good-ish week.

K: He'll be so glad to hear that.

D: Yeah, it wasn't a slam-dunk visit. And I'll get to the criticism later. But I was pleased to see the Pope pushing back against some of the most hateful elements of Orbán’s political ideology.

K: Yeah, I saw some of the headlines – didn't the Pope call Orbán out on his migration policy, kind of?

D: Kind of, yeah, he did. I mean, it's something - the Pope's views on migration definitely don't align with the views of Orbán, who has an increasingly xenophobic political agenda. I've actually got this quote from the Pope that you were probably referring to. He said, ‘How sad and painful it is to see closed doors, the closed doors of our indifference towards the underprivileged, and those who suffer. The doors we close towards those who are foreign, or unlike us. Towards migrants or the poor. Please, brothers and sisters, let us open those doors.’ And he went on to then directly address the political class, pleading for everyone to be more open, including those with political and social responsibilities. He said these words in front of roughly 100,000 people in Budapest on Sunday morning, with Orbán sitting there in the front row, and it is just quite satisfying to see someone – even if that someone is the Pope – get away with giving a speech like that in front of Orbán. I guess maybe the Pope is the only person that could get away with it, with Orbán staying sitting. This all happened whilst being watched by all those people in the crowd, and of course, tons of Hungarians watching live on television. And as we've discussed before on this show, Hungarians hear less and less from anyone who doesn't echo the views of Orbán’s party Fidesz. His party have, bit by bit, found ways to make almost the entire media landscape in Hungary an Orbán- friendly landscape. So even if the Hungarian news channels probably didn't choose that clip about open doors when they were showing highlights of the speech, still, a ton of people have watched it live. And maybe for some of them, it will have communicated… something?

K: Maybe!

D: Although I did just watch an interview on the BBC with someone who was there, and he said he thought the applause from the crowd was pretty muted at the end, and he connected that to what the Pope had been saying. So yeah, maybe it didn't have the intended effect. But I mean, what else can you do?

K: I mean, he could have just not gone to Hungary. Wasn't that an option?

D: Yeah, that would of course have been an option. And actually, some people are quite surprised that Pope Francis did decide to visit Hungary this week, especially considering he visited as recently as 2021, albeit only for a few hours to attend mass on the way to Slovakia. Some critics of Orbán think that the Pope really shouldn't have visited, for example, the historian Stefano Bottoni told The New York Times that this trip was an extraordinary showcase for the regime. Although he did give that quote before the Pope's closing speech on Sunday, so I wonder if he'd reflect on the trip at all differently now? I mean, possibly not.

K: Was it awkward between Orbán and the Pope? Because they're not like best buds or anything, are they?

D: I don't know if it was awkward. Orbán seems to have been wanting to appear like Pope Francis’s best bud during this trip, which is a kind of classic opportunistic move from Hungary's most wily political operator. But you're right that they haven't traditionally got on so well. According to previous guest of this show Szabolcs Panyi, Pope Francis has for years been widely portrayed as an enemy of the Orbán government in pro-Orbán propaganda, due to his statements around migration and gay rights that just so clashed with Orbán’s political programme. So Szabolcs found it therefore quite jarring to watch the Hungarian government present itself as this humble and pious – oh, and Catholic – thing. Because Orbán himself is not Catholic, nor is the president. They are both nationalist Calvinists. But during this papal visit, everyone suddenly seemed to be happy to pose as a Catholic. And of course, Orbán used this visit to try and stress his so-called protection of traditional Christian family values, posting pictures online of the Pope with his family and posting tweets saying things like, ‘Hungary has a future if it stays on the Christian path.’

K: Do you know, like, what proportion of the Hungarian population is actually Catholic?

D: Yeah, good question, because there were figures being bandied around as if they were official figures during the Pope's trip saying that about 60 percent of Hungarians are Catholic. But it seems that the actual figure, according to the most recent data, places the number of Hungarians who are Catholic closer to 40 percent, which is quite different.

So, still a fairly big proportion of the population, then. All of the migration stuff aside, what else was talked about? Because I think before the trip, I read that they were going to talk about Ukraine a lot, right?

D: Yeah. And that was a big topic of the Pope's meetings and speeches. And some people think that Ukraine is the reason why he actually decided to go to Hungary at all. He seems to be hoping that he can have some kind of humanitarian impact on the war. And seeing Orbán as the closest European leader to Putin, it’s not a completely mad idea to think that Hungary would be a good strategic place to go to try and make progress. And he actually talked on the plane home to journalists about one specific plan. He was working on a secret Vatican plan to arrange the return of Ukrainian children who have been taken to Russia during the war.

K: Did he describe it as a secret Vatican plan as he was telling everyone about it?

D: Yeah, I said ‘secret Vatican plan’ because that's how it's been reported everywhere. But I don't know why we're calling it a secret plan, seeing as he's now talking about it. Some have accused the pope of naivety in thinking that his presence in Hungary could help the Ukrainian cause, and while he did go and meet some Ukrainian refugees in Hungary, he also controversially met with the Russian Orthodox Church’s representative in Hungary. So yeah, it's been a good-ish week for the Pope. Before we move on, I have two other quick things I wanted to share. Firstly, the Hungarian president used the papal visit as a moment to pardon some prisoners, including a far-right activist convicted of terrorism. All in the spirit of forgiveness, which is pretty gross. And secondly, on the flipside, something that pleased critics of Orbán was that the Pope held a surprise meeting with the mayor of Budapest and his family, one of the most powerful opposition politicians in the country and fiercest critics of Viktor Orbán. So yeah, Good-Ish Week, Okay Week for the Pope. It's one of those ones where the more I look into it, the more I'm not sure if it really is a Good Week. But it's too late now!

K: Do you know what, though, by the standards of this podcast, I'd say this qualifies as a pretty decent week.

BAD WEEK - 11’44”

D: Okay! Who's had a bad week?

K: I'm giving Bad Week to a new Italian tourism campaign that has backfired rather spectacularly. It's mostly been generating memes over the past week taking the piss out of it. Although, I mean, you could argue that all publicity is good publicity, I guess. Anyway, the campaign is called ‘Open to Meraviglia’, which means ‘open to wonder’. And I guess that's the first problem – like, why is the slogan in this weird semi-English, semi-Italian? We also see this a lot in French advertising, and it never works well.

D: And Dutch.

K: It's a very strange thing. We should make an episode about it. But yeah, ‘Open to Meraviglia’ is the slogan. And taking the starring role in this tourism campaign is a shiny digital rendition of Venus – as in, the goddess Venus, as seen in The Birth of Venus, the 15th-century masterpiece painting by Sandro Botticelli, which hangs in Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In the tourism campaign, though, Venus has had a 21st-century update, and she has been reimagined as a social media influencer.

D: Oh, no.

K: Oh, no, indeed.

D: What does that look like? I actually want to Google it now.

It looks like Venus eating pizza and posing for selfies wearing, like, a denim jacket and a miniskirt. And she says, ‘Hi, I'm Venus. But you probably already knew that. I'm 30 years old – okay, maybe just a little bit older than that. And I am a virtual influencer. What does that mean? Well, let me take you with me on a journey around Italy's most fantastic places.’ Venus doesn't come across as very smart in this advert. She's… she's pretty basic.

D: The pizza does look delicious, though.

K: There you go, this campaign is working on you!

D: I can imagine this isn't going down so well with the Italians. What's the response been like?

K: It's gone down pretty horribly. So the Italian version of Wired Magazine said that this was a campaign that seemed to have been created by, quote, ‘boomers who think they are innovating’. And it pointed out that the rather idiotic version of Venus that we see doing tourism in the video – she doesn't really seem to be especially ‘open to wonder’ as per the slogan. She actually seems to be mostly interested in taking selfies in places that are, if anything, already blighted by over-tourism. She goes to St Mark’s Square in Venice, she eats that delicious-looking pizza by Lake Como. She seems to be, as Wired put it, disinterested in history and context. So yeah, the main thing Italians have been taking objection to is just that it presents this really stereotyped, boring, very touristy version of Italy, and it isn't really about wonder at all. And it's also kind of funny that they chose this half-Italian half-English slogan, ‘Open to Meraviglia’. Firstly, because it's clunky as hell, and also because the current right-wing government is waging a war against the use of English in official communications. But it seems like the tourism ministry and the tourism board didn't get the memo.

D: But hey, this is for foreign tourists, right? So it makes sense that it wouldn't be in Italian. 

K: Yeah, but the one word that is in Italian is the least easy for foreigners to say, I would argue. Like, people are then going to have to go and google ‘what is meraviglia’.

D: So you said Italians have been making lots of memes out of this?

K: They have, yeah. People have been having a lot of fun creating different memes that reimagine Venus in some less cliched settings. So you can see Venus as a grandma in Puglia, making orecchiette in the street, you know, those little pasta shells that look like ears. There's one where Venus has taken her career as an influencer in a new direction, and she's launched herself on the adult website OnlyFans. There's also quite a few political memes that have been made out of this, including one version where someone has taken the slogan ‘Open to Meraviglia’ and changed it to ‘Open to Refugees’, and they've replaced Venus's head with that of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose government has introduced a series of much harsher migration policies recently. So people are definitely talking about this campaign, just maybe not in the way that the tourism board intended. A couple of other criticisms have also been raised, including the fact that a filmmaker named Massimiliano Milic noticed that the footage you can see of a vineyard in the campaign video – which is of course, intended as a reminder of Italy's amazing wine production – that footage was actually shot at a vineyard just across the border in Slovenia.

D: Oh!

K: Oops.

D: Awkward.

K: Very awkward.

D: I wonder how much it cost to make this campaign?

K: Well, I can tell you, it has cost nine million euros.

D: Oh my goodness.

K: Which is not how I would spend nine million euros personally, but hey, I'm not the Italian tourism ministry or tourism board. They have sought to justify it in terms of how much money it's going to bring in for the industry. Tourism is obviously one of the jewels of the Italian economy. And it's an industry that suffered a huge amount during the pandemic, so they're trying to make up for lost time. And the company that was hired to come up with the campaign, Armando Testa, they've stood by it. They said that Venus is a symbol of rebirth. They've also actively used the argument that all publicity is good publicity. They actually took out a full page ad in the Corriere della Sera newspaper last week, arguing that it has been half a millennium since Venus was talked about this much. To be honest, I am almost inclined to agree with them, because we are sitting here right now talking about this campaign. I guess we'll have to see how it goes down internationally. It's a global campaign launching this month, these posters and videos are going to be shown everywhere from Asia to Latin America. But I just wanted to state for the record that I am going on holiday next month to Italy, I'm heading to Naples and Sicily, but it is not because of this campaign, okay? I have not been won over by Venus the Influencer. I just thought it was important to state that.

D: No, it was because of Stanley Tucci.

K: Stanley may have had something to do with it, I may or may not be planning on going to a couple of places that he ate.

HELP US OUT BY JOINING THE EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF DEMOCRACY JURY! - 18’12”

K: We have reached the part of the show where we usually ask you to sign up to support this podcast on Patreon. This week, we're going to ask you something a little bit different, actually. We would like to suggest a different way of helping this podcast survive, that doesn't involve you having to give us money. What's not to like? Don't worry, this is not a weird cryptocurrency scam. We have actually teamed up this week with a very interesting initiative called the European Capital of Democracy. They are holding a public vote on which European city is the best at celebrating democracy and giving power back to the people who live there. To do that, though, they need people to sign up to be on their jury. And they're not just trying to get, like, 10 people to vote for this thing. They are trying to get 10,000 people to vote for it, which is where you guys come in. Honestly it's quite a nice thing to be able to do in itself to have a say in picking the next European Capital democracy. But even better, our podcast gets paid a little bit of money for everyone that we manage to recruit onto the jury, so signing up is a really, really great way to help us and take part in a very worthy democratic exercise at the same time. Anyone can take part as long as they're aged over 18 and they live in a Council of Europe country, which includes many, many countries in Europe, not just in the EU. And we would really, really love it if you signed up. And also maybe, you know, ask your friends and family to sign up too, why not?

D: But it's not a pyramid scheme, we promise.

K: It is absolutely not a pyramid scheme. There's a special link in the show notes so that the organisers know that you signed up because you heard this podcast. That link is in the show notes.

D: We also have some lovely new supporters to thank from Patreon. They are Cheron, Sergio, Cynthia, Adithya, Chiara, Liam, Karina, Veeney, and my colleague Juliette. Thank you all.

K: Thank you all so much everyone. You can join these wonderful people at patreon.com/europeanspodcast.

LISE WITTEMAN INTERVIEW - 20’26”

K: One of the reasons that we set up this podcast is that we still don't really feel like Europe has the public sphere that it deserves. There are some media outlets these days that are aimed at an audience all across Europe, but there's not many of them. And the ones that do exist tend to be aimed mostly at people within the Brussels bubble – you know, the kind of people who understand the meaning of words like ‘comitology’. But this idea of being able to feel European, and think about Europe as a single place, rather than just a collection of neighbouring countries, that's not just something that's going to come from having media outlets that are aimed at Europeans. I actually think that comedy and satire are a really underrated part of how we think about our politics and our identity. Like, in every country across Europe, you will find people making jokes about national politics. Making jokes about European politics? That's a much harder thing to do. People don't follow European politics as much, so it's harder to write jokes that land properly with a mass audience. However! There are some people in Brussels taking on the valiant task of trying to make EU comedy a thing. The Schuman Show is a monthly live comedy show that was set up in Brussels in 2021 by a motley crew of journalists, former eurocrats and comedians. They have since ventured onto YouTube and Instagram in a bid to bring their jokes to a wider audience. Can it work, though? Can the EU really be made funny? To find out, we rang up one of the Schuman Show’s co-founders, Lise Witteman.

K: I have to say I don't think of the European institutions as being the richest source of potential comic material, but I'm assuming that you guys disagree with me. What is it that you find funny about Brussels and its institutions?

LISE: Maybe you know – of course you know – ‘Yes, Minister’, the very old comedy on the British people working for the minister and having their own thoughts and ideas, and just having their minister more as a spokesperson for them than actually being their boss. And I think them making fun of the very bureaucratic ways, and also their villainous kind of approach to make sure that things go their way – and of course, you have the lobbyists here, and you have the journalists here. So one of the things I think are very funny are the acronyms and the jargon, and also the Euro-English. Actually, when I started living here in Brussels, I think I had a better English or British accent than I have now, because of all the Italians and Hungarians and Polish speaking – this is me, like – awkward English. And then we all together make a very strange euro kind of English out of it. And there are so many ways of approaching the European bubble and seeing the fun in them trying to move up, trying to make their ways into the higher institutions. So there's a lot to poke fun at.

D: And who is it you're trying to reach with your comedy? Is it mainly for Brussels insiders, or do you think people who know nothing about the Brussels bubble can find it funny too?

L: The big aim has been from the start to reach out of the bubble. I'm a journalist, I do investigative journalism regarding EU affairs. And the whole struggle every time is to see how can I get my 3000-word investigative article to be read by people outside of the bubble, so that they actually know what is going on. And of course, most of them won't read that kind of articles. But it is important for people to understand, and it is important when they go and vote next year at the elections, that they understand who they are voting for and what kind of policies those people proclaim. So I've been thinking, together with Kelly Agathos, who is our co-founder, and she's a performer – like, how can we make sure that other people will understand a little bit more about the Brussels bubble? And that is how we thought of a comedy show. Because we see that especially in the United States, but there are also some good examples in the Netherlands – you have Lubach, for instance – who really achieve to make a very difficult story and explain it in a way that is really recognisable, and that people think, ‘Ah, this is what it's really about. That is interesting. I should act on this, or I should do something with that.’ So that has been our aim from the start. That having said, it's very popular among eurocrats, like people in the Brussels bubble, we sell out our shows weeks in advance. And that sometimes makes it tempting for us to also make too much, like, insider jokes. So we have to every time choose, like, ‘Okay, what is interesting for the EU bubble specifically and what is more interesting for the people outside?’ And then for the people outside we put that content online and share it on our socials.

CLIP: Coming to us straight from Germany, please put your hands together for a German Leopard tank. Most of your brothers and sisters, they’re heading east – in fact there are four Polish Leopard tanks being deployed to Ukraine today.

- Ja, good job Europe, eh? Yeah, the Poles are going and some others are going. But I am a German tank. 

Well, yes. 

- It’s not a good idea for me to go to ze east. 

I’m just a bit surprised, that’s all – usually tanks go to warzones. 

- Zis is a very stereotypical view of tanks.  

K: So as you say, you do have this very serious day job as the investigative lead at the EU branch of Follow The Money – our listeners will remember that we talked about your Great Green Investment Investigation just a few weeks ago. Does this day job inform your writing for the Schuman Show, and vice versa? Can you get ideas for investigations based on comedy writing?

L: Yes, all the time. Because for the Schuman Show, I think of what would be an interesting topic. And then you approach a topic in a different way and see another angle. And you might think, ‘Ah, but that is maybe even more recognisable, or even strange from an outsider look. For instance, we're now making a new piece on buying influence and all the shades of grey that there are, because there's like the very shady ways – putting money in a suitcase and just blatant bribery. But there's also other ways of buying influence, because you have many lobbyists. If you have a lot of money, you can buy more influence that way. So that kind of thinking, that really feeds into each other. And sometimes I think of, ‘Maybe there's a follow-up article in this, now I look at it again. Yeah, it does feed into each other.

D: Sounds cool. You said that you are quite popular within the Brussels bubble. Do you ever think of your comedy as kind of a bit like a low-key lobbying operation, as a way of kind of holding the Brussels power to account?

L: Of course it is. We are not the spokesperson for the European Commission or the European Parliament, they have plenty of people to do that job, they get paid a lot more than we do as well. So we really feel like this is a form of journalism or a form of holding the power to account and to make jokes to actually show what is really going on and to poke fun at it, because we think there's something there. No, it totally is one of the aims we have.

K: Who do you most enjoy satirising? Who are the funniest politicians in Europe right now?

L: Oh, sometimes I feel the more *not* outspoken a person is, like von der Leyen – you know, what is funny about her? Or what is her character? Then you can also play around with it more, because she's so like a white page that you can think of anything. While when someone is already a big character then you can only characterise the character, so there's not more to add to it. 

CLIP: Please give a warm round of applause to the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola. Do you have a female leader group of some kind, do you do you talk among yourselves? Do you have a network?

- We actually – we do, we have a WhatsApp group.

Oh, really? You have a WhatsApp group with Ursula von der Leyen?

- Mmm hmm, with all of the female EU leaders.

Oh, so Sanna Marin as well?

- Everybody, everybody.

Okay, and what exactly do you do on there?

- We share saucy screenshots… slow cooker recipes, pictures of our husbands doing the bare minimum….

So you really are super women.

D: Do you know whether you've ever upset any politicians with one of your sketches that you've written?

Not that they come forward to us… Oh, I do have one occasion that we had a sketch about small EU member states, poking a little fun at them, and also especially Malta, because, of course, there's a lot to say about Malta and the way their government acts on journalism, et cetera. And then we got a letter from one of the people in the audience saying, ‘Well, I didn't really like you poking fun of Malta that way.’ And… yeah. I think that this is part of the game.

K: I mean,satire can be cruel, right? Comedy can be cruel, especially when you are making fun of real people and real countries. How do you find the right balance?

L: I think for now, we have many actors who are more from Western Europe. I think it will be better if we – and we are aiming to – get more people from other member states as well, to indeed find that balance. Because in the beginning, we had a bit too many Brexit jokes, for instance, and I was like, ‘Okay, there's more to Europe than Brexit.’ That is also, for us, something we're still looking for, searching. And we started in September 2021 with the people we found then who were available and very good, but we want to have more and more people joining our show. And I think more and more characters and also more variety. But for instance, now we have a journalist who is actually from Romania, and we have a journalist from Spain who's also in the writers’ team, and we have an actor from Spain. And so we are trying to be more diverse, as much as possible.

K: If you're based in Brussels, you'll be pleased to hear that The Schuman Show’s next live show at the end of the month will be a Eurovision special. If you're not based in Brussels, you can expect some clips from that show online shortly afterwards. And you can find more info and tickets at the link in the show notes.

ISOLATION INSPIRATION - 31’58”

D: Time for some Isolation Inspiration. What have you been enjoying this week, Katy?

K: Speaking of Eurovision, I very much enjoyed the two episodes of The Allusionist podcast about Eurovision. We are no strangers to making podcasts about Eurovision ourselves, we've already released one episode this year about the songs that don't make it onto the final. And we may or may not have another interview coming up that touches on the world's most ridiculous music competition. A lot of you will probably know The Allusionist – I feel like there's quite a lot of language geeks in our audience, and The Allusionist is the podcast for language geeks par excellence. And these two episodes are all about the debates and controversies and strategies there've been around language at Eurovision over the years. So for example, something I didn't know about was all of the flip-flopping that has been about whether countries should be forced to sing in one of their official languages. Because there's been this constant debate over, like, whether you're more likely to win if you sing in English or another language that's considered cool or sexy. So French, for example, notably used to be the language that you might want to sing in to have a good chance of winning. There's also some fascinating stuff in these two episodes about wordplay that's been used to try to sneak political messaging into Eurovision songs. And something that I found very, very funny – listen to this bit. Here is the former guest of this podcast, Dean Vuletic, talking about a trend that emerged in 1960s Eurovision songs.

CLIP: And that was also a time in the 1960s, 1970s when we had several songs in Eurovision about going on holiday, usually sung by Northern Europeans going to the south. Southern Europeans never sang about going to Northern Europe and having a holiday there and falling in love, whereas Northern Europeans often did.

D: Oh, so interesting. Of course, no one wants to go on holiday here.

K: I would pay so much money to hear Italians singing about going on holiday to the Netherlands. No offence to your very wet, very cold country. Somebody make that happen.

D: Tragic. Such an unromantic country I live in.

K: Soz. What have you been enjoying this week?

D: I also have a podcast recommendation this week, I listened to a fun two-part podcast that was on the feed of a show called Decoder Ring. The episodes are called The Curious Case of Colombo's Message to Romania, Part One and Part Two. I know you're too young for it, but do you know what Colombo is?

K: Like a detective show?

D: Yeah, exactly. It was a huge detective show on NBC from the late 60s about a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. And apparently it was huge in Romania. So in this podcast, host Willa Paskin sets off on an investigation to look into a truly bizarre story which she can't work out if it's true or not. And she really wants to get to the bottom of it. It’s a story that Peter Falk, who played Columbo, told David Letterman back in the ’80s on TV. In the interview, he suggested that he was roped into making a special recording for Romanian state television in the 1970s. A recording that was, according to him, an attempt to quell a communist revolt in Romania. Paskin is so intrigued by this pretty far-fetched story, so she digs really deep to try and find out what actually happened. She's an amazing podcast host, so it's a really enjoyable listen. And along the way, I learned so much about Romanian history, so I would really really recommend it to everyone. It's called The Curious Case of Columbo's Message to Romania, and it's on Decoder Ring.

K: I am queuing that up as my next play.

HAPPY ENDING - 35’53”

D: For this week's happy ending, I've got pleasing news from Europe's rivers once more. The organisation Dam Removal Europe just published their annual report and I'm sure you've all been reading it from head to toe. If you haven't, then you might be pleased to hear that there were a record number of river barriers removed across Europe in 2022 – 325 of them in total, across 16 countries. Getting rid of them is a big boost for biodiversity, allowing the water to flow more freely, making it easier for migratory fish to move and breed and having a knock-on effect to all the other wildlife. Spain wins the prize for the most removals, they got rid of 133 river barriers, that's more than a third of the total number in Europe. So well done Spain.

K: Good job Spain.

D: And they were followed by runners-up Sweden, and France in the bronze position. There's of course a long way to go – there are thought to be 150,000 old or unused dams and weirs across Europe. So come on, many more easy wins for the years to come. Let's make a competition of it and see if someone can beat Spain.

K: It's good to harness people's competitive instincts, I think, for the greater good.

D: Gamify the dam removal.

K: A sentence I didn't think you'd be saying today.

D: That's all we've got time for this week. But if you'd like some more Europeans content before next Thursday, head to YouTube, where you can see the latest visual version of one of our podcasts – the final visual version in our series This Is What A Generation Sounds Like, made by our friends at Are We Europe. It's really beautiful, so go and check it out.

K: Do it! You can also come hang out with us on Instagram @europeanspodcast, or on Twitter @europeans pod. And please please remember to sign up for the European Capital of Democracy jury if you want to help fund this podcast and celebrate democracy at the same time. The show was produced this week by me and Wojciech Oleksiak, thank you Wojciech.

D: And thank you, Katy.

K: You're welcome! See you next week, everyone.

D: Bye!

K: Doei.