Riverdance

One of the great things about Xmas is all the ‘specials’ they show on the TV. The films you’d thought you’d never see again. The shows you loved in the past and which they run again, and the spectaculars, one of which was Riverdance.

Now I’ve seen countless ‘Riverdance Specials’. Riverdance – The Beginning. Riverdance in Beijing. Riverdance – The Dancers. But on Saturday they showed a compilation of all the best bits of the shows and I took the opportunity to record it to show in my bar when people get fed up of Girls Aloud, Madonna or Club Ibiza.........which they do .......frequently.

Let me say at this point that I have no great affinity with/for Ireland, or to be more precise Eire, despite the fact that J has tried to trace my family tree and found that us Cupples’s may actually originate from Eire as opposed to good old France which is what popular myth says.

Anyway. I don’t know what attracts me to Riverdance although I have a vague memory that one of my ex’s took me and I thought it was great but it could be that I like strong, rhythmical music. I could watch those girls dancing all night long with their arms, rigid by their sides and their long hair swaying to the rhythm of the drum beats. I wont say anything about the guys in case you get the wrong idea but they’re quite cute too.

With a compilation show, you get all the lead dancers of course, but by a country mile, the best were Michael Flatley and Jean Butler, who co-developed the original 7 minute act at the Eurovison Song Contest in Ireland which started this global phenomenon. Flatley has gone on to be a multi-millionaire achieved through his ‘Lord of the Dance’ productions, but many people do not know that he was born in Illinois, USA and was a boxing champion and a proficient flautist before he became all-Ireland, World Dance champion. He also held the Guinness World Record for the number of ‘taps per second’ at 28 then 35 (that’s taps per second – not his age). I saw a film of Flatley recently and he came across as a total big-head which I suppose is only to be expected if you are worth in the region of £350m.    

Jean Butler, who was also born in the USA, and who was heavily involved in the original Riverdance productions presented the compilation show and came across as a really nice girl, but then she’s a redhead and all redheads tend to be gorgeous. Oooops – sorry J!

So back to where it all started at the 1994 Eurovision Song Debacle (sorry Contest) which was staged in Ireland because they had won it the previous year. The interval came along and then the stage went dark. A mournful songstress appeared in the gloom but after two minutes of what the global audience must have thought was a rehearsal for a funeral, Jean Butler started dancing, followed within a minute by Michael Flatley. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

See the 1994 Eurovision interval which introduced Riverdance to the world at the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5Mc03_rlWo