Overproduced Euro songs meet their Waterloo

Don't say the whole marvellous, ridiculous, diverse, overproduced extravaganza didn't make you feel part of an interesting and rather irrepressible continent. On Saturday, 100 million viewers were feeling European and vaguely proud – with good reason.

Europe is diverse. And given the appalling performance of banking and political monocultures lately, diversity is suddenly healthy and desirable again.

On Saturday, 25 countries did 25 different things to 25 songs in an event the Americans couldn't have conceived or produced thanks to our iconoclastic variety and permissive weirdness.

The strange interlude where women stuck in plastic bubbles of water were suspended from the ceiling trying to kiss male acrobats suspended below was indescribable. The light show, stage management, rockets, fire displays and camerawork was breathtaking. It was a visual feast – but more a mixed-up, multicultural buffet than a cordon-bleu three-course meal.

Sir Tel was hardly missed as gay and proud Graham Norton picked up the role of the vaguely sneering honorary Brit as if to the manor born. He wisecracked about paying the airfare of the Iceland contestant – but had to concede by the end that her performance was "pretty good".

And that's the point. Despite all the pelvic thrusting, 16-inch waists, stripteases, suggestive lyrics and Boney M rewrites, the winners were talented singers and musicians blending folk tradition with well-staged pop.Not only was it a bit of a triumph for the arc of prosperity, this year's Eurovision was a massive triumph for tradition.

Commercially successful art-forms have all but overwhelmed Britain in recent years. This year's British entry was created by twinning lucrative money-making propositions – the upmarket credentials of musical maestro Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber – with the popular appeal of X Factor-style winning singer Jade Ewen.

It didn't work. Britain didn't come last but didn't catch the zeitgeist either – and could have done. When "real" performer Susan Boyle turned the world of TV celebrity upside down last month, Britain's Eurovision organisers could have read the runes along with Simon Cowell. The world is ready for more low-tech, traditionally-based, home-grown "people's" performers.

On Saturday, Alexander Rybak wrote, sang and fiddled his way to success, breaking a seemingly intractable law of modern, musical gravity – all things traditional and "authentic" get ground down while all things cynically mass produced and vaguely American just rise up. This weekend, they didn't.

In our fast-paced, English-speaking, American-influenced, celebrity-copycat European world a fresh-faced, original "native" talent won through.

Rybak is a typical product of mainland Europe – he speaks three languages and has lived in several countries. He's not Norwegian but was born in Minsk to classical musicians who decided to leave Belarus when their son was four. Like any good hybrid, he mixed cultures and won Eurovision with a song borrowing from Norwegian and Russian folk music accompanied by a high-energy performance from folk dance company Frikar.

The song took a record 387 votes, nearly double the tally of runner-up Iceland and third-placed Azerbaijan.

In other words, a young violinist working outside his "pure" medium did what the talented trio of Sir Andrew, Diane Warren and Jade Ewen could not – he tapped into European folk traditions to produce a song with pace, cheek, tapalong-ability and a memorable riff.

Naturally there are detractors. Rybak delighted the Moscow audience by addressing them in Russian. Inevitably cynics are claiming his Baltic background and "East European rhythms" helped him win the hearts of the Soviet "bloc" vote.

This is sour grapes – Norway was in the Top 3 of almost all voting nations. But it misses the point too. Those were not "East European-style folk rhythms and harmonies", as one French newspaper suggests, but near universal rhythms and harmonies of folk music across Europe – maybe the world. The sooner the chattering classes of old Europe reconnect with those old cultures – and their own feet – the sooner they may be in with a shout in a rejuvenated, re-rooted Eurovision.

Poor old Britain. Poor old Andrew Lloyd Webber, poor young Jade and poor old UK Eurovision organisers who keep picking turkeys. Revamped versions of Bucks Fizz haven't won. Revamped attempts at Lulu haven't won. So here's a suggestion.

Next week, Britain's Eurovision selectors will have to think again. Instead of looking to theatre and celebrity TV for inspiration they could travel north for an injection of authentic tradition. The Orkney Folk Festival starts on Thursday with a concert featuring Shetlander Chris Stout – just back from a tour of Northern Norway, where each pupil gets exposure to seven professional artists and performers over a school career.

On Sunday, Saltfishforty are performing. The name comes for the classic Orcadian excuse for heading down the pub: "I had salt fish for tea."

The upbeat, foot-tapping, euphoric atmosphere created by fiddler Douglas Montgomery and singer/guitarist Brian Cromarty must be experienced to be believed, but you've probably never heard of them. Traditional music moves most Scots but not movers, shakers or funders.

Scotland could put traditional music back on the map with a vengeance by commissioning 1,000 fiddlers and 1,000 pipers to march down the Royal Mile as parliament opens each September. Colour for a weary nation, and proof that Scotland's traditional talent could create a fairytale hit in 2010 – if Eurovision selectors could change their tune.