Ukraine made its Eurovision debut in 2003 and
too just one year to work out what it took to win the contest as
Ruslana and "Wild Dances" claimed victory in Istanbul in
2004. An surprisingly successful staging of the contest in 2005 was
slightly marred by a disappointing performance of the home entry,
but in Athens in 2006, Ukraine bounced back in the Top 10, meaning
that this year's entry is an automatic finalist.
This year Ukrainian broadcaster Channel One
decided to have a national final. The selection was held on March
9th at the NTU TV Studios in Kyiv. The winner was chosen by a
mixture of televoting and a jury. The favourite in both sections
was the the song "Danzing" written and performed by the
female impersonator Andrei Danilko under his stage name of Verka
Serduchka.
Andriy Mykhailovych Danylko was born October 2nd
1973 in Poltava, Ukraine. Though a relativly successful composer
and musican and composer of ambient music under his own name he is
better known by his stage name Verka Serduchka a character based on
a Ukrainian housewife who doubles as a comedian, pop singer and
rather a rather unusually styled dancer.
His stage personality of Verka Serduchka is a
rather extravagant and flamboyant woman. Under this disguise Andriy
has been performing since the early 1990s. This stage name was
invented by Andriy for the KVN student humor contest, combining the
randomly picked first name Verka with the real last name of his
former school classmate Anya Serduk.
In 1997 the first the first songs "Prosto
Vera", "Abrikosy" were released. Later, other tracks
like "Ya rozhdena dlya lyubvi", "Ya vyshla na
perron", "Vaza i pion", "Controler",
"Po chut-chut" were released and the music videos became
very well known. He gained an invitation to appear on Ukrainian
channel "1+1" "SV-show" where he portraited a
train conductor Verka Serduchka.
Since the autumn 1998 the show was broadcast
simultaneously on Russian channel "TV-6". This show is
the one that brought huge popularity to the comic and he issued
music albums as Verka Serduchka: "Ha-ra-sho!",
"Zheniha hotyela", "The Best. Neizdannoe",
"Tralli-valli" and also the instumental album "Posle
tebya" under his own name. All these albums sold well with
"Ha-ra-sho!" alone selling over half a million copies
Under the Verka Serduchka persona he appeared in
various musicals of Russian/Ukrainian co-productions. Has created a
solo musical "History of Verka Serduchka". In 2005 verka
made a first attempt to enter Eurovision both for Russia and for
Ukraine but was disqualified in both countries: in Ukraine due to
failure to appear for preview-video shoot and in Russia because of
a failure to submit lyrics of the song. After claiming in one of
his music videos: "I've decided, I'll go to Eurovision
representing Kazakhstan, let others win too!". In 2006 was
considered a candidate to represent Poland in a duet with Polish
act "Renia Paczkowska", but Renia aka Mihal Wisnievski
decided to enter contest with own band "Ich Troje".
Shortly after the selection of this year's
Ukrainian entry, there were strong criticism of the selection by
several prominent people in the Ukraine, claiming that the act was
not a suitable international representative for the country. There
has been no international promotion for the Ukrainian entry and it
has not done well in internet polls, however the fact that Verka is
known across all of the Soviet Union and the catchy nature of the
song, has meant that it is doing well with the bookmakers. The song
has also been re-recorded with a heavier baseline (the version that
you can hear above) and it's believed that this is the arrangement
which will be performed in Helsinki.
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UKRAINE @ EUROVISION