The Eurovision Debacle

So this year the competition has gone beyond being just ludicrous. The songs were not just mediocre they were bizarre, incomprehensible or just stupid. Andy Abraham sang a reasonable song and certainly didn't deserve to be last. The great Sir Terry Wogan is now considering his position, and all Western European countries need to accept the fact that they will never be winners, or leave the whole thing. Where did it all go wrong - well maybe the enormous proliferation of countries taking part didn't help, but it is the new 'political' voting that has taken over in the past few years that has nailed the whole contest. To the Eastern European bloc (and here I include the former Soviet republics and the Balkans) this contest is a big deal so all the populations of these countries who find themselves 'abroad' get voting in massive numbers. Germany always awarded maximum points to Turkey because of their large numbers of 'guest workers' but now the huge emigre Russian populations always vote for Russian, and the Balkan states vote for each other (because there are Serbs, Croats, Albanians, and Bosnians scattered throughout so many countries). This year the large Romanian population in Spain voted en bloc. This isn't going to change, and no tinkering with the voting system will solve the problem. The only alternative is a series of local contests for each area and then a fixed voting system for the 'finalists' otherwise the UK should withdraw from the whole thing.

Andy Abraham Wins

So the winner of the competition to represent the UK in this year's Eurovision Song Contest

turns out to be a runner up in one of the numerous X-Factor competitions that have been aired over the past few years. How many winners can we name, let alone runners up? Anyway, no disrespect to Mr Abraham, but however good the performance, or the song, the chances of the UK troubling the scorers in the final are minimal. Western European countries notoriously do very badly in the voting, because there is a cartel (implicit or explicit) between the countries of the Balkans, the Baltic States and the former Soviet countries. Hey ho - it makes bizarre television viewing.

Eurovision

I have the misfortune of watching the 'elimination' round for the British entry to this year's

Eurovision Song Contest. Now we already know that things can only end badly - in fact if the UK didn't contribute so much to Eurovision, thus giving us an automatic entry into the contest we'd never reach the finals - or even a preliminary round. We have a hint of how things work from the last two years' winners - we are in Serbia this year as they won in 2007, the Finns won the previous year and Estonia the year before. How apt then that the singer of one of the UK's entries comes from Romania, can't sing in tune, looks weird and is thus likely to do very well. Except we all know the Balkan countries always vote for each other, as do the Baltic countries, Cyprus votes for Greece & vice versa, nobody votes for western European countries. Ah well, thank heavens for Terry Wogan.

The Eurovision Song Contest

Words fail me.