My Defence of Eurovision

I have decided to use my 51st post (please note how quickly this has appeared after my 50th post - I'm getting better!) to defend the Eurovision Song Contest. Now, I realise that this may not be the post of mine which gets most comments, but that doesn't matter. Since the contest, I've seen many people complaining about how the Eastern countries vote for their friends, etc. Much of this has come from Terry Wogan, who revealed his poor knowledge of geography ('Georgia must be near Serbia'), history ('Armenia is a former satellite state') and memory ('Baltic voting again' - before the Baltic countries had voted). I thought it was a great contest!

Here are some facts:

1. This block voting that Terry Wogan talks about - countries voting for their friends - is simply wrong. It's not countries voting for their friends at all. The borders of eastern Europe do not tie up with the borders between ethnic groups as they largely do in the western countries. Consequently, does Estonia always give good points to Russia because they are friends (which they most certainly are not) or because nearly 26% of the population of Estonia are ethnic Russians? Nearly 29% of the population of Latvia are ethnic Russians. I believe there are large numbers of ethnic Russians in every one of the former Soviet states. The same is true in the south - 38% percent of the Bosnian population are ethnic Serbs. The line 'Bosnia gives points to its best friend, Serbia', just isn't accurate.

2. Terry Wogan seems to forget that many of these areas - the 'ex-Soviet block', the 'Scandinavian Block' and 'the Balkan block' (interestingly, Wogan seems to use the terms Balkan and Baltic interchangeably) share celebrities. Did Belarus get top points from Russia because the two countries are friends, or because the Belarusian singer came very high in the Russian version of Pop Idol? The singer from FYROM is a big celebrity in all of the former Yugoslav countries. The Ark, from Sweden, are very popular all over Scandinavia. Cultures and tastes are often very similar between neighbouring countries.

3. Languages. Serbia sang in Serbian, a language spoken and understood in Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Montenegro (although Slovenia and Macedonia have their own languages too). They can understand the songs! If one year, every country sang in Serbian apart from maybe Hungary that sang in English - I think Hungary would get quite a lot of the British points!

4. 'No-one voted for the Western countries.' Yes, that's true. Including the Western countries. The only reason the United Kingdom got points from Malta was because many Maltese had decided to boycott the Eastern European countries - they were protest points. (The UK song had 'nul points' written all over it!)

5. Yes, it seems that Cyprus and Greece always give each other points (and Ireland often gives them to the UK, but that's ok), but this never affects the winning song. Finland won last year (never won before), Latvia and Estonia have both won recently (and got crappy points ever since).

My rant is over! Something must be right about the contest if nearly 11 million Brits watched it! I thought the music was of a high class too (at the beginning, before the Ukraine, UK and Romania got their hands on it...)

PS: Quite a lot of people seem to have been quite taken with the German performance. I can tell you that Roger Cicero's album Männersachen is fantastic (it's in German of course) and it's available from www.amazon.de priced €14.95 (if you want the version with Frauen Regier'n die Welt on it). A brilliant CD.