Tomorrow night sees the cultural highlight of the year, the Eurovision Song Contest. The winner of the thing is decided by public voting in the participating countries. There has been discontent for a few years among the traditional participant countries of Western Europe over how the influx of Eastern European nations has distorted the voting, probably because culturally similar countries tend to vote for each other. Whatever the reason, suddenly there are an awful lot of small countries who aren’t going to give Spain or the UK douze points any time soon.
Anyway, the ESC has now become so big that they have to hold a semi-final, lest the contest proper take all day. Here are the ten countries that qualified from the 28 semi-finalists:
Bulgaria
Belarus
Georgia
Moldova
Serbia
FYR Macedonia
Hungary
Slovenia
Turkey
Latvia
Hmm, notice any pattern there? Those countries join 14 other finalists, of which only Ireland and Sweden and the four automatic qualifiers (because they basically pay for the thing) Germany, France, Spain and the UK are from Western Europe.
It’s a fix, I tells ya! Terry Wogan is going to do his nut. Are we ever going to win Eurovision again?
Now lets be honest, if the voting was completely fair, the UK probably wouldn’t have received the points from Ireland and we’d have been finishing even lower. Alternatively, even if we had the best song ever, I don’t think we would stand a chance.
I do enjoy the songs. I’ll probably turn over once it comes to the voting though. Although I do enjoy Wogan’s comments…
UK <> Ireland is definitely a voting bloc, but unfortunately a bloc of two. We do also have a bit of a mutual voting thing going with the Scandinavians, but it still isn’t enough, and I suspect that that hussy Finland has “gone Eastern” after its victory last year. No, you need to be in the big ex-Soviet voting bloc to stand a chance these days.
Perhaps in a few years, if it becomes painfully obvious that no Western European country can win (or qualify), the main funding countries will start to get uppity.
I’m a little disappointed that some of the songs I liked in the semi-final have not gone through. I’m sure they’re probably on Youtube by now though.
Of course, the biggest tragedy of all is that they’ve cancelled Doctor Who this week!
The bloc voting/neighbor voting thing has been going on for decades, of course, but the groups were so small that it didn’t make much difference. Greece and Cyprus both always finished with at least twelve points (from one another), but since Greece has only won once and Cyprus never has, nobody minded much. The important change is that now enough countries are doing it that it queers the results, and for me at least it stopped being funny after the first couple years and started getting annoying.
An interesting suggestion I’ve heard is to have two Semi-finals, with no automatic qualifiers (or maybe just the Big Four qualifying because otherwise they’d squawk). For the time being, separate them geographically, with the Western European entries in one and the Eastern European entries in the other. Make a commitment to mix the countries randomly between the semi-finals in the future, when the cycle of geographic bloc voting quiets down to a reasonable level - the EBU can work out what that means.
Yeah, yeah. I’ll be watching tonight anyway, with the kids.
Of course I’ll be watching the European Song Crapfest. It’s the cheesiest thing on tv and a must see.
However, since many countries tend to look at last years winner (Lordi with their monster outfits and fake heavy metal) this year we have more guitars than ever before, and the Swiss had the incredibly bad taste of sending D.J. Bobo with the song “The Vampires are Alive”.
Don’t worry Eurobeat is coming to the Edinburgh Festival.
From the site:
*Just think mini Eurovision Song Contest, but set in sunny safe secure Sarajevo. Competitors from 12 Countries compete with one another (our best musical theatre performers pretending). The audience adopts one of 12 countries. It doesn’t matter if you were born in Cronulla or if your parents are from Trieste, tonight you’re from Liechtenstein!
After the twelve songs, the audience votes for their favourite country and every night there could be a different winner. ALL VOTING IS GENUINE SO BRING LOTS OF YOUR FRIENDS AND COUSINS. (Not that we want to encourage vote stacking).*
It’s a very, very funny night out and skewers Eurovision perfectly. Much fun.
Fortunately. DJ Bobo was ousted in the semifinals. Even more fortunately, Germany is always set for the main contest, or else we would be watching things from the sidelines together with out abysmal contestant. I always said we needed more expats - Germany used to get douze poing from Spain all the time, when lots of Germans tended to live on Majorca. From last year’s result, that seems to have petered out somewhat. Also, we need more fireworks.
I don’t know how I managed to miss the amazing tackiness which is the Eurovision Song Contest. I only watched the semi-finals tonight because I was expecting Iron Chef on SBS and I was an instant fan.
There was a very dour documentary beforehand, detailing how having not won the Eurovision had scarred the Finnish psyche, until they were released by the win of a heavy guitar band dressed as extras from Buffy.
I can’t work out what I loved best; the Swiss vampires (a huge group of people and none of them can sing?, the Danish drag queen (I’ll be your Drama Queen tonight"), or the Israeli Goth rappers (with accordion). Half-naked fan dancers; a nest of dancers tied together with feather boas; enough leather pants and glitter (often on the same person) to turn the whole world into a disco ball and one girl with her pants cut so low an audience of of ten million people could have given her a gynecological exam.
I love the Eurovision. I hope Ireland never wins again. We’ve proved we can punch above our weight in euro-cheesemongering with seven victories. Ever see the Eurovision episode of Father Ted? It was hilarious! I don’t know what they think in the UK putting Scooch or whatever that band’s name is. They’re desperate and not in a way that’ll secure them Eurovision success.