LostInTheWoods

(Or “vote for your neighbour“ Contest)

For those of you who live outside of Europe, much of this post will not mean that much to you. Part of growing up in Europe requires you to experience the annual “weird Uncle” of European culture.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC to aficionados) is held every year in May and throws up some truly bizarre characters and songs. Some participants you may have heard of (Lulu, Cliff Richard, ABBA etc) and many you would not know from Adam.

I wasn't going to blog about it this...but things have got a little out of hand....

On Saturday evening, we did the traditional thing of sitting around, with munchies and beer to watch all the songs. Some were real dirges while others were good songs, though they may be in a foreign tongue. The best bit is the voting results, which determines who is going to win and the country that will have the honour of hosting the competition next year.

Every country has to phone vote on the twenty three songs on offer, a country cannot vote for their own entrant. Every year there is a little political voting, but this year it went crazy. With the addition of a lot of small Eastern European countries, and the former Yugoslavia countries all voting for each other, so basically people were voting for their neighbours rather than for the songs.

Places 1 to 16 (out of 24) were taken up of countries not in Western Europe. So there have been calls for the voting system to be changed to prevent this. The voting has always been political, but now it has got to the stage that no matter how good your song is, if you are not from the right country, you just will not win.

Some Members of Parliament in the UK are putting forward a Parliamentary motion to get the voting rules changed. The head of the Malta contingent confirmed that Malta (on a public phone vote) gave the UK full marks as a protest against all the vote-for-ya-neighbour shenanigans (it couldn't have been for our song, it was awful). Sweden's entrant apparently was not overly chuffed at what happened, seeing his efforts being beaten by weaker acts.

I cannot put the whole debacle any better than Sir Terry Wogan:“I've said it so many times it has become a cliche. We won the Cold War but we lost the Eurovision.”

So it has all kicked off, but this does over shadow the winning entry, from Serbia, that is actually quite good (although it is in Serbian) and was the best song on the night. There are a few Serbians in my class and they are proud as punch, good thing too, this was their first year entering the competition. I guess it is only fair for small countries to get a bit of the spotlight.....

That is all.

LostInTheWoods