Some Facts

Posted by David Ralfe (Marketing & Admin. Assistant, Hoipolloi)

Things are pretty quiet in the Hoipolloi office at the moment. Steffi Muller, our Associate Director, is away in Edinburgh performing with our friends Menagerie. (Click here for details of the show, Correspondence.) In fact, I’m the only person I know who isn’t going to the Fringe this year. And in the meantime, whilst everyone else in Theatre-land is busy at the Festival, the phone here is quiet and my inbox is empty.

To pass the time, I’ve been learning about Helsinki. That’s because on Thursday Hugh Hughes and Aled will be flying out to Finland to perform Story of a Rabbit at the Korjaamo Culture Factory. The set and lots of our technical equipment is already on its way and I had a great time rummaging around the Hoipolloi store last week, until Richard, our Production Manager, forced me to stop exploring and do back-breaking labour while we packed up the freight. (The Story of a Rabbit set is really heavy.)

Anyway, before we go into Fun Facts About Finland, I should say a couple of things:

1) I have learned everything I’m about to tell you from the internet and Wikipedia. It may or may not actually be true.

2) A lot of the aforementioned websites preface their facts with the adjective “fun” and, frankly, they don’t deliver. I don’t consider statistics pertaining to population demographics to be fun. Nor is the fact that the country’s dialling code is 358. By contrast, my Finnish Facts will be 100% Funtastic.


FACT 1:
Helsinki? More like HELLsinki. Such was the outrage when “hard rock quintet” Lordi bagged Finland’s first ever Eurovision victory in 2006. The group is fronted by the inimitable Mr. Lordi. Past band members with amusing names include a bassist named G-Stealer. Apparently he was kicked out of the band because he kept stealing all the G’s from the band’s alphabet fridge magnet set.

FACT 2:
There’s a statue of a super-sexy mermaid in the market square in Helsinki. On the 1st of May every year, students gather round the statue to celebrate the arrival of Spring. (And to stare at a sexy mermaid, probably.) The statue hasn’t always been popular though. When it was unveiled in 1908, women’s rights groups protested that it objectified women. Two years previously, women in Finland had been granted the vote: that’s 20 years before the same happened in this country. (Wow, those Scandinavians are progressive.)

FACT 3:
The city’s animal symbol is a squirrel.


Well, I'm sure you all got a lot out of that.

Let's finish with a video of Lordi, performing their song, Would You Love a Monsterman?