Myshuno

This year’s Eurovision song contest was already two months ago, but I still want to talk about it for a bit.

If you’ve never heard of it: It’s a typical example of European kitsch and every year it’s exactly the same. Wikipedia says:

The Eurovision Song Contest (French: Concours Eurovision de la Chanson)is an annual competition held among active member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

Each member country submits a song to be performed on live television and then casts votes for the other countries’ songs to determine the most popular song in the competition. Each country participates via one of their national EBU-member television stations, whose task it is to select a singer and a song to represent their country in the international competition.

It’s the only contest I have ever seen where it’s okay to sing awfully bad. Nobody cares anyway. When people have to vote for their favourite song at the end of the show, what happens is that most people don’t vote for the best song, but they vote for their favourite neighbouring country instead. This is what we call ‘political voting’.

So when they start counting the votes, you’ll notice groups of countries all voting for each other. You got Scandinavia (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark), the UK and Ireland, Spain and Portugal, all countries that used to be Yugoslavia, the eastern bloc, and Holland’s got…well Belgium of course! But the Belgians don’t seem to like us that much lately. Which is why we never won the contest for over 30 years now.

To give you a bit of an impression of the show, here’s a parody clip:

Now they may have redubbed the sound, but the images were real, very real.

Anyway, I watch it because Terry Wogan does the voice-over on the BBC. Which is just hilarious…

Voor de nederlanders: Ik heb wat problemen met de taalfunctie in het systeem, maar ik zal proberen om de Nederlandse versie van dit artikel zo snel mogelijk online te krijgen…