Sun 13 May 2007
The Eurovision Song Contest has left me in a sulk. Not because it’s silly (that’s a given), but because it’s almost too predictable. As Diamond Cartographer Geezer’s map shows, the results are based more on geography than writing or performance. It makes me wonder: what’s the point in scoring? What’s the point in having a winner when being the winner is effectively meaningless? Next year, why don’t we just have thirty top-quality songs and forget about all that expensive* premium-rate phone voting? Oh.
For what it’s worth: France and Georgia had the best songs. Sweden put on the best performance, and probably would have won if it wasn’t for nationalism. The proof of this: I haven’t been able to get the French chorus out of my head all day even though I don’t know what any of the words are. Now that’s proof it’s a good song.
* for the callers, not the EBU
Keyword noise: Eurovision
May 13th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
It also shows very clearly that the UK has no friends in Europe. Anyone else think the government’s been sucking up to the US too much?
May 13th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
It’s hard to say - our song was bad enough not to deserve any votes to start with.
May 13th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
I haven’t seen the broadcast (why would I?), but if there’s one country that has “no friends in Europe” (and that isn’t called Germany), then it’s Serbia… It seems that Croatia gave them 12 points. Which is just weird.
(I don’t have a feeling that many Europeans blame the UK -as a country- for their government’s decisions.)
May 13th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
One way of looking at it is to say that Serbia has no friends in Europe, or another is to say that there are probably a lot of ethnic serbs throughout the other former Yugoslav states, including Croatia and Bosnia, who feel some connection to the song (likewise ethnic Russians in Estonia etc who would vote for Russia), as well as the many states speaking slavic based languages who would have some language based and cultural affinity with the other slavic language speaking states, not to mention people sharing religion (orthodox greek/serbian/russian - bosnian/turkish islam). The semi-successful one I couldn’t understand doing well was Armenia. My favourite was the one where the lyrics translated to something like ‘the lassie sings eeee!’ on the digital singalong translation thingy. The worst part of it all for me was Wogan’s dumb, misanthropic, xenophobic commentary and then to see the viewers’ texts at the end declaring him a god for his xenophobic commentary. Having visited it in November, I loved the shots of Senate Square in Helsinki and wish I’d been able to see more of the ‘postcards’, minus Wigan’s bile.
May 13th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
Oh, also meant to say that the hating us for the war thing (which nobody has mentioned here but does get said a lot the day after Eurovision since 2003) doesn’t really wash when we scored better than Ireland. I think Eurovision has just shifted to the East. I wonder if Palestine and Israel will operate a geo-political voting block next year?
May 14th, 2007 at 7:36 am
Aaah, but Wigan is a national treasure for doing that! Apparently.
Paul Gambaccini mentioned the war on Today this morning - and seemed to think that noone else had thought of it for the past four years.
H, when we were watching it: “Why have Bosnia given Serbia 12? Wasn’t there a big war between Bosnia and Serbia?”
Me: “Well, yes - because of the huge number of Serbs who live in Bosnia”
May 14th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I actually think that the UK doesn’t have that many friends in Europe. I don’t know if it is the ’sucking up to US too much’, though that definitely is true. Perhaps it is because of the time-honoured British tradition of not considering Britain to be part of Europe.