Malta 2006 - Day 8

It seems that the accepted thing to do when your country wins a World Cup match is to drive up and down the same bleeding stretch of road for hours at a time, blasting the car horn continuously until it drives ordinary people with a brain absolutely senseless.

I must get myself a flag to wave around a lot for no apparent reason.

So far we haven’t bothered to watch any of the hotel entertainment for the reasons I mentioned earlier but tonight the entertainment is being provided by someone calling himself Martin Elvis. There are no pictures of this bloke on the hotel’s entertainment bulletin board but we have to go don’t we? It’s his name. It just makes me want to see him. If he’s an Elvis impersonator than that name is a stroke of genius. Most Elvis impersonators usually have the name Elvis first or in the middle of something else don’t they? It’s either something like ‘Elvis’ Travis or Danny ‘Elvis’ Travis or whatever. But this bloke’s said to hell with that. My name’s Martin so I’ll just stick Elvis after that. That’s good enough. That’ll do. And he’s not even thought of modifying his first name slightly to make it sound more rock ‘n’ roll like Marty. Marty Elvis; now that sounds a bit better doesn’t it? But, no, his name’s Martin and that’s what he’ll be called: Martin Elvis.

But what a huge disappointment Martin Elvis was. Yes, I know we’ve never yet seen a hotel act that was any good, most have been abysmal. But you live in hope don’t you? And anyway I get as much enjoyment out of watching really bad entertainers as I do the good ones. With the bad ones I laugh a lot more. Martin Elvis wasn’t just bad, he got nil points for effort. He hadn’t made any effort to look like Elvis, he hadn’t made any effort to dress like Elvis and he didn’t make much effort to sound like him either. He had his sound system loaded up with backing tracks of Elvis songs and various other songs of the fifties and sixties and he just stood there singing over them in the manner of a bad karaoke singer.

He was frozen to the spot. He didn’t move an inch when singing apart from skipping to one side every now and then to twiddle the controls on his karaoke machine. During each song’s instrumental break he put his microphone down and just stood there gazing into the middle distance waiting for his cue to come in again. He might have just as well put the mic. down, sit on a chair and read a book. It was such an apathetic performance it was no surprise that the audience couldn’t decide whether to clap or not. In fact when he asked if anyone had any requests, someone in the audience shouted, “No.”

We lasted about fifteen minutes before heading for the bar for a serious drink.