Eurovision

[caramel_betty]

I believe I'm possibly the only person on the Internet who doesn't give a shit about this year's Eurovision. We lost. It's not some massive global conspiracy. We lose when we put up bad songs with bad performers who perform badly on the night. Remember Gemini? Hopefully not.

• Other countries put up good, well-known, well-liked performers. I

Comments

[caramel_betty]

I think the reason people are annoyed is they think the song this year was good, and that he performed it well.

These people are insane.

[caramel_betty]

Given that the points only go to a subset of the countries, anyone who isn't solid top 5-10 material is going to (potentially) face problems scraping together many points. At that point, politics may play a role in seeing which countries let us scrape into the bottom couple of places for points, or whether they let someone else in instead. Basically, if every country in Europe thought that our song was worthy of being 15th overall (instead of last), we'd come last because there are no points for 15th place.

You have to be playing the game so that some countries like you - it doesn't matter if that makes you drop from 15th to 20th in another country, if you go from 15th to 5th in others. This is why, politics aside, many countries vote for each other - they have similar cultures, and large numbers of ex-pats and second generation families there, and so on. There aren't many countries in Europe that England has a shared culture like that with.

[brigbother]

> they have similar cultures, and large numbers of ex-pats and second generation families there, and so on

Brilliant! So it's not a song contest, then?

Anyway, sod off! Lonely Symphony is AMAZING.

[caramel_betty]

Let me see. Which song is the average phone voter in the street going to like more? One that's a good song that's similar to their own culture, and therefore other songs they like, or one that's like a completely alien culture and unlikely to grab them on a first play?

If you had the Eurovision cooking contest, where everyone in the EU gets to taste a tiny bit of meal for a minute or two and then vote, would your average phone-voter in another country be more likely to find food that's close to the foods they eat in their country more tasty? Would it be all political if we served up finest haggis, and the Mediterranean countries voted for pasta dishes, and eastern Europe wanted a good goulash?

People are going to vote for things they enjoy. If our song, played once for three minutes, is completely unlike anything else they've ever liked, you're not going to suddenly re-educate their tastes in three minutes.

Why is it political when people vote for what they like, and we don't provide something they like?

[brigbother]

Right, so what was cultually significant to the eastern entries that they might want to vote for each other? They seemed pretty by the by to me.

[caramel_betty]

It's not about "cultural significance". It's much simpler than that. A song that is liked well-enough in Country X is likely to be liked in a nearby country that has a similar/overlapping population - which is quite often the case in Eastern Europe at the moment.

[brigbother]

So it's an immigration contest?

[caramel_betty]

No, it's a song contest where the people you have to convince (the phone voting masses) will vote for things they enjoy. Similarly, a Brian Sewell art criticism programme is never going to win a phone vote for Best TV Programme as voted for by Heat readers.

How has the concept of understanding what an audience enjoys passed the UK by completely?

[oldbloke]

How has the concept of understanding what an audience enjoys passed the UK by completely?

Ant & Dec

[caramel_betty]

It's entirely possible that they might vote for the same countries even if we did put in a song that was clearly aimed squarely at the Eurovision audience. If that did happen, we'd be in a much stronger position to make a complaint. Year after year, we're putting in poor choices and then complaining we do badly because Europe hates us.

Also, no, you're missing the point. As I said in my first post: Are we putting up the British Justin Timberlake, or any other big name pop acts? The British Madonna? The British Celine Dion?
Does Justin Timberlake do well in Russia? Yep. If we were putting in the British Justin Timberlake, is it possible that he'd do well? Quite possibly. But we don't. We let the British public select something they like out of a bunch of mediocre has-beens. Is it any surprise that the rest of Europe don't like what we put up? They like Justin Timberlake and Kylie, as you say. Andy Abraham isn't Justin Timberlake. He's not that good, and he was singing what he termed as "funky soul" (as I recall from an

[caramel_betty]

you think the song and performance were bad enough, and the style foreign enough to Eastern Europeans, that the lack of votes the UK received can be put down entirely to cultural differences and the vagaries of the voting systemNot necessarily foreign, but one can compensate for the other. A big name Justin Timberlake-like artist could probably carry off a less obvious style - perhaps even make a Lordi-style point of it. The reverse is also true - you can get away with a lesser performer if the song is great to start with (and the performer can still actually pull it off