Suck on this, Eurovision!

Another thing I didn’t know till I actually read the Eurovision coverage — the Russian entry team got Timbaland to produce the song. So certainly geopolitics played a part, but they also knew what they wanted and went about getting it.

If it was the quality of the song then there wouldn’t be a Eurovision… ;)

They know who controls the spigot.

Ukraine came in 2nd once with this. The contest was won by Serbia.

Two swell countries I guess.

As songcraft doesn’t appear to be involved with winning I advise artists from the UK to be luckier.

Right. This also explains poor score of the entry from Poland, because Europe did not forget how Mussolinski and Hitler teamed up during WWII. Their fault!

What jim jay said.

All the former Soviet Union states voted for Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, etc., and all the former Yugoslav republics voted in the same manner: Serbs living in Slovenia voted for Serbia, Croats living in Bosnia voted for Croatia, etc.

Surprised Spain voted for Romania?
Read this: http://bancaja.es/ING/corporativa/prensa/fichanoticia.aspx?id=752

The danger with Eurovision [and I am entirely alert to the ironies in even writing that phrase] is that the patterns of voting evident might suggest not, as The Wogan opines, that people are not taking it seriously, but rather, and more troublingly [albeit probably only about a 1.5 on a 10-point scale], that people all across Europe might be taking it too seriously as a way of expressing nationalistic, or at least ‘bloc’ sympathies.

It’s probably several orders of magnitude less worrying/surprising than most other possible manifestations, but it is at least, I feel, disappointing, given the contest’s avowed [tacky, pointless, trivial] commitment to international harmony. [hah!] There was not really, in its heyday, anything remotely unpleasant about the Eurovision Song Contest. Now, alas, there is.

Germany does not have sizable numbers of ethnic Germans living in the neighboring countries (although used to have until the end of WWII), Russia has.

Hey, this one is even funnier:

Another well known case is that of Judi Roberts, also known as Tiffany Noel, who was born and raised in Indiana, USA. In 1999, at the age of 57, she had a stroke. After recovering her voice, she spoke with an English accent, a mixture of cockney and West Country, despite never having been to Britain. [4][5] Apart from a British accent, she has begun using British vocabulary, such as “bloody”, and “loo”. Professor Ryalls attributes this to vocal tract posture, as British English has tenser vowels. [6]

dave, wouldn’t “voting by bloc” and “voting nationalistically” by closer to opposites than extensions of the same issue? his grace the abbot of wogan gets very agitated that everyone in former yugoslavia seems to vote for one another, but given recent events it seems more like an encouraging development than a frightening one

the piece i linked to also makes a point — admittedly not terribly clearly — about the votes of guestworkers: the point i think being that, if you’re say, polish in the uk (a) eurovision is possibly the only big polish-related cultural event on tv except for maybe football, and (b) you’ll vote for the place you’re from not the place you’re working

this may not be a huge constituency but it’s possible it’s a bit more partisan than the home crowds (who are watching but nbot voting), and there’s unlikely to be much quid pro quo (not that i know anything about uk guestworkers in poland, maybe there’s lots of them)

it’s actually one of the few cultural-competitive events eastern europe has a chance of a better showing in than western europe: they put a lot more energy and work into it, self-evidently, esp. since ukraine’s ruslana (deservedly) won in 2004 with “wild dance”, in the run-up to “the orange revolution”

belle le triste,

It seems to me very likely that, when Slovenia gives 12 points to Serbia, this is not so much because Slovenes love Serbia, but rather that many Serbs living in Slovenia voted for Serbia.

I don’t have any proof for this hypothesis, of course. After all, it also makes sense to say that Slovenes voted for Serbia because they understand the lyrics, and Serbian music in general is quite popular among many Slovenes. But this approach doesn’t explain why Spain voted for Romania; the “immigrant hypothesis” does.

Ah, thank you so much for posting this. I have been so mystified by the 12 points from Bulgaria to Germany, but now it’s all cleared up!

There was not really, in its heyday, anything remotely unpleasant about the Eurovision Song Contest. Now, alas, there is.

This.

I’ll start by saying that Russian entry wasn’t great by any means. There were lots more eligible participants in my view. However, I don’t think that “block voting” or politics has that much influence on the voting results. Let me explain.

1) If you do vote politically, you’ll give the 3 top votes to your preferred countries, or maybe even 4 votes. But a quality song would easily get into the 6-7th spot of any country however political its vote may be. And so we get 6*43=258 points – without any country ever giving it a score higher than 6… So, if there was something worthy, it should be able to win easily!

2) The voting I think is primarily based on migration. Portugal and Spain both gave high numbers to Ukraine – construction workers. Israel to Russia – lots of emigrees. Germany to Turkey, etc. Basically, the top votes go with population %, the rest as people feel like. Another thing is – it’d be extremely interesting to see the actual numbers – how many people vote in each country, for example. I suspect not that many…

3) The UK coverage is exactly that – sore losers. One might wonder why the UK came dead last, but one thing is for sure – it has no friends in Europe. I guess, shouldn’t have been pushing away for so long…

the uk is coming dead last because we completely lack gumption and we’re not trying and we don’t know HOW to try, or want to be seen to be trying: we pretend we don’t care even if we actually secretly really do* — we never get someone with brit pop credibility (rock cred or chart cred or dance cred or old-skool pipe-and-slippers crooning cred) to enter, we always pick some pawky just-arrived semi-amateur — the last time we went with a seriously pre-established big name was i think cliff richard (who has cred problems all over, obviously, but also a very solid long-lasting history in the uk charts); ruslana was — by serious contrast — a prizewinning big deal IN the ukraine, who went on to win outside the ukraine

this is classic brit whining i think: johnny foreigner is cheating by actually putting in the legwork

Yes, Japan seems to have better kitsch than Europe, but here’s some evidence that they’re losing it. Hard to tell if that’s worse than the child exploitation on display here.

i think actual up-to-date gay icon stuff might work better than stuff even VERY VERY straight people know to think of nicely coded gay: ukraine already hit the “xena: warrior princess” vote dead on ruslana, which is not exactly cutting edge (unless yr a samuel delany fan) but at least goes over the heads of maintream stand-up

A commenter from the UK on the BBC discussion forum is exceedingly put out by the UK entry’s poor performance:

other countries are making a statement of dislike for the UK by not voting at all. The probability of only getting points from 2 countries based purely on the song must be low. I’ll be taking my hols in the UK fro now on, they’re not having another penny off me and I hope the BBC pull the plug on this hateful farce.

For heaven’s sake, man, it’s the Eurovision Song Contest! Get a grip!

As for the British being poor losers, in my neighbourly fashion, I was rooting from the start for Ireland’s illustrious entry: the Turkey:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kNloytljOo&hl=en

This was indisputably an entirely original contribution, I felt, which put the whole contest into a profoundly meaningful perspective. Sadly, it got eliminated in the first round.

The Russian singer was about average for Eurovision. The Greek and Turkish entries were horrible parodies of American pop.

I think I would go for the Portuguese singer or the Ukrainian singer, the singer and the song were quite good, but the disco arrangement was awful.

@18 + 34: It has been done. Maybe next year’s ESC…

this is classic brit whining i think: johnny foreigner is cheating by actually putting in the legwork
Good grief – you don’t think the Russians had been practising beforehand do you?
Clearly the only way forward for Britain next year is to appeal to the majority of the Euro-electorate & hire Sacha Baron-Cohen to perform in-character . . .

And all the world over each nation’s the same,
They’ve simply no notion of playing the game;
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they’ve won,
And they practice beforehand – which ruins the fun!

Interesting thing for me was that while the Balkans generally happily voted for each other – Armenaian and Azerbijan gave each other no votes. Obviously Nagarno-Kharabakh (spelling from vague memory) still rankles.

Good lord.

As for the Greek entry, she was actually raised in New York. That fact might go to explaining why it sounded so pop-parody. Every time my greek girlfriend listens to it, I sing in response, “my perfect combination is mystery to me” and think to myself how bad this song is.