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Television Media The Media

Physicists Uncover TV Show Biases 435

Posted by Hemos from the the-joy-of-statistics dept.
Tsalg writes "Interesting to see what scientists can uncover from watching one of the silliest TV shows in Europe, where singers represent countries in a contest, and then countries vote for.. for what exactly? Well it was reported in a Nature article where the show was used as a barometer of European nations' feelings about their neighbours, that Britain is in harmony with Europe, Nordic countries fancy each others' stars, and France is out on a limb."
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Physicists Uncover TV Show Biases More

Physicists Uncover TV Show Biases

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  • Lalah (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Turn-X Alphonse ( 789240 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:22AM (#12612270) Journal
    Watch the UK broadcast of it if you can get hold of it. The "host" has been doing it for years, he always comments on it and points it out every time people vote for "friends". It's been that way for years and always will be.

    Hell it's the best reason to watch for us in the UK. The back handed comments rock.

    • Re:Lalah (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Derling Whirvish ( 636322 )
      The UK is the only broadcast to not take the show seriously and that makes Terry Wogan's commentary the best part of the show. It's like a live version of MST3K.

    • Re:Lalah (Score:5, Informative)

      by RemovableBait ( 885871 ) <[slashdot] [at] [blockavoid.co.uk]> on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:38AM (#12612444) Homepage
      The host, Terry Wogan of BBC Radio 2, has to be the only reason I watch the Eurovision Song Contest. As a UK resident too, it is one of the silliest programs we have on our schedule -- and we continue to humiliate ourselves year after year.

      This year, we lost out right at the bottom, with only 18 points. Compare that to a Moldovan granny banging a drum, which sailed on to 6th place with 128 points. And, before you ask, the granny in question was beating the drum from a rocking chair on stage. The commentary before and after that little number was hilarious.

      The real problem with Eurovision, is the underlying politics. The Eastern European and Baltic Countries cannot dismiss this as a singing competition. They instead fight furiously for votes, and vote for the neighbours whenever possible. This is what is turning the whole competition into a farce... the Baltic 'block voting' means that the 4 primary contributors to the European economy (France, UK, Germany and Spain) are the last 4 on the leaderboard -- year after year.

      I makes me wonder exactly why we continue this ridiculous tradition -- Greece gives 12 points to Cyprus, Cyprus gives 12 points to Greece, and on and on... Quite frankly also, the singing was abysmal -- I can sing better when drunk than the winning entry this year, and that is saying something.

      • Re:Lalah (Score:5, Insightful)

        by R2.0 ( 532027 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:46AM (#12612532)
        "I makes me wonder exactly why we continue this ridiculous tradition"

        Umm, because previously European matters of national pride (read "pissing contests") were settled (or not) with guns and bombs.

        Stick with the dumb TV contests - fewer refugees that way, and it will allow Europeans to hold on to their self image as peaceful, war hating types.
        • We don't pretend to be peaceful and war hating, I thought that was the USA's job.

          No, Europe were the bloodiest set of warmongers on the planet. Britain happened to be rather good at it.

      • possible misconceptions (Score:5, Insightful)

        by JanneM ( 7445 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:55AM (#12612631) Homepage
        Yes, there is a good deal of "friendly" voting going on. The reason may at least partly be taste, though. Neighbouring countries tend to be very close, culturally and lingustically, people tend to meve between them a lot and can usually see each others television and radio broadcasts. So they will tend to have more similar taste in music than countries far apart. I would not be surprised if that is one part (not all, obviously) of the "bloc voting".

        As for your second point, why would the amount of money contributed to the EU correlate in any way with the popularity of the songs? Looking above, you'd expect the opposite, actually. A country is a large contributor because it's, well, a large country. And a large country tend (other things being equal) to be more insular and less influenced by the cultures around it. The songs will tend not to appeal as widely among its neighbours or other european countries as the smaller, more exposed, countries.

        And yes, musically it's rather like a slow-motion trainwreck, but that's part of the appeal :)

      • Re:Lalah (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Turn-X Alphonse ( 789240 )
        I thought it was Wogan but theres so many of them people (Bob monk house etc.) they all seem to merge and I didn't want to get it wrong.

        But yea we're getting owned but that just proves Europe hated the war no?

        • Re:Lalah (Score:3, Informative)

          by RemovableBait ( 885871 )
          Exactly. Remember a couple of years ago when we got zero? That was just months after we went to war with Iraq, much to Europe's annoyance. Coincidence? I think not.

      • Re:Lalah (Score:3, Funny)

        by David Horn ( 772985 )
        Ah - Terry Wogan. The man no longer welcome in Denmark after he called their hosts "Dr Death and the Tooth Fairy."

      • Re:Lalah (Score:5, Informative)

        by k98sven ( 324383 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @01:12PM (#12613660) Journal
        This year, we lost out right at the bottom, with only 18 points. Compare that to a Moldovan granny banging a drum, which sailed on to 6th place with 128 points.

        You can't quite blame that on friendship voting though. (I.e. they got points from a lot more places than just their neighbors)

        The group in question (Zdob si Zdub [zdob-si-zdub.com]), is an established group in East Europe (4 albums), with several hits and are pretty well known in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Hungary, etc.

        Like them or not, a lot of East Europe does and that's more of a cultural thing than a friendship thing.

        Friendship only goes so far too.. Norway only gave Sweden (who's song totally sucked) a single point.

    • Re:Lalah (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 )
      What timezone are you in? The show was broadcast 2 days ago.

      The most interesting part for me was seeing things like Turkey giving Greece maximum points, and Serbia and Croatia giving each other a lot of points (hey, the war was a good 10 years ago).

      The Germans coming last (less than half the points of anyone else) also provoked a bit of national soul-searching. Only a bit though :-)

      Oh yes, and when I drove home that night there were some cars on the road beeping their horns with massive Greek flags bei

    • Re:Lalah (Score:3, Funny)

      by gowen ( 141411 )
      Incidentally, if Britain is "in harmony with Europe", how come we only got points from Ireland and Malta, eh? And we had to give Malta a medal to get those...

    • Re:Lalah (Score:4, Interesting)

      by siriuskase ( 679431 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @12:10PM (#12612790) Homepage Journal
      Is this going to be the next European TV show that gets imported to the US? I can imagine, state vs state, backhanded compliments to who? Alabama? 50 is a lot of states, maybe they will do regions.

    • Re:Lalah (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Peturbed ( 885463 )
      I do find it quite funny that the four financing countries (Spain, Great Britain, France and Germany) all came in last. The smaller countries take it very seriously, one of their spokespersons even said it was "Europes finest event". This at a stark contrast to the UK, where we all think its a bit of a joke. Wogan is the only reason to watch, he's fantastic.
  • Did they even bother to look at the result of the voting?
  • Wait, that's NEWS? Everyone in Europe at least already knows that, whether they watch the, um, show or not. :)

  • IIWAP (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:23AM (#12612277)
    (If I Was A Physicist)...

    I would find a more scientific subject to study, you know, that is actually related to physics.

    • Re:IIWAP (Score:3, Funny)

      by justforaday ( 560408 )
      I think it's a typo. It should probably be "psychics"

    • IYWAP... (Score:5, Funny)

      by clickety6 ( 141178 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:36AM (#12612418)
      (If you were a physicist) you'd probably also have nothing better to do on a Saturday night than stay home alone watching the Eurovision song contest ;-)

      • Re:IYWAP... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MartinG ( 52587 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:53AM (#12612600) Homepage Journal
        I _am_ a physicist (well, not really any more but I have a physics degree) and I arranged specifically not to be at home when this was on because my gf wanted to watch it and I couldn't bear it. I went to the pub and had a few ales instead which is a much better idea.

        • My friends were out watching ROTS. I would have been there too, but oh no, I had to be at home watching Eurovision, didn't I?

          Y'know, sometimes having a girlfriend isn't all it's cracked up to be. :o)

      • I'm a physicist (by education anyway) and I didn't stay at home alone to watch it. I went to a Eurovision party and laughed at all the entries in the company of friends, booze and tasty Terry Wogan cakes.

        Do people in the rest of Europe really take it seriously? Nobody in the UK does.

    • And guess what, this is not a particularly good scientific study either. From TFA:
      The researchers admit that their analysis is based on one contentious assumption: that all the songs presented are equally good, so that votes are a reflection of national taste rather than the absolute quality of the entries.
      Ah great!! They could easily assume that they are right from the beginning and don't even waste so much time to analyze that data!

    • Re:IIWAP (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Princeofcups ( 150855 )
      > (If I Was A Physicist)...
      > I would find a more scientific subject to study, you know, that is actually related to physics.

      The study shows a bias in the statistics, that such a system is not stocastic. This is a good lesson for any physics researcher. Do you think all physics is quarks and quasars? It's much more mundane than you may realize.

      btw, my BA is in physics.

      jfs

    • I would find a more scientific subject to study, you know, that is actually related to physics.

      IMHO, this "Javine" person pictured in TFA appears worthy of further study.

      Caption - "Javine is Britain's hope for winning this year's Eurovision song contest."

      Sub-caption - "She's no Moldovian granny banging a drum, but there you are."

    • For example (Score:4, Funny)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @01:38PM (#12614109) Homepage Journal
      When I was a student oh so many years ago, two physics student friends came up with what they believed was an object (i.e. quantifiable) measure of female beauty. I'll try to remember this -- physics was never my strong suit.

      The first student suggested moment of inertia about the z axis. The second amended this by suggesting it be divided by the natural period of oscillation. In other words, the measure represents a compromise between curviness and jiggliness.

      Now, I need hardly add that for these two young men, this was a purely theoretical exercise. Neither at the time had the least discernable empirical experience with the female sex, because dates for them were about as elusive as the Higgs boson. It wasn't until a few years brought a bit more maturity that they actually dated and eventually got married, an outcome I suppose that may justify some optimism for the prospects of many Slashdotters.

  • Feh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (reggoh.gip)> on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:24AM (#12612292) Journal
    Ever since France has been at the forefront of social development with it's Revolution, it's always been sait that "it's out on a limb" by other less-advanced countries.

    But eventually, all other countries adopt the principles put forth by France.

    • Re:Feh... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by leathered ( 780018 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:25AM (#12612303)
      ..like metric time and the Paris meridian?

    • Re:Feh... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by stlhawkeye ( 868951 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:42AM (#12612479) Homepage Journal
      Ever since France has been at the forefront of social development with it's Revolution, it's always been sait that "it's out on a limb" by other less-advanced countries.

      Which forefront are you talking about? The Revolution of 1789, which took place 14 years after the English colonies in North America had their revolution? Or when Napolean took over the Republic and abandoned it for another monarchy with his family in charge? Or when his son dissolved the second Republic and declared the French Empire? Or maybe you're thinking of the Vichy government's collaboration with the Nazis?

      France is many things, but a model of how to run a liberal utopia it is not. It's a nation with as complicated, confused, and self-contradictory a history as any other. It deserves neither the unqualified praise you imply in your post, nor the unqualified derision it receives from the American right.

      • Re:Feh... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Lars T. ( 470328 )
        The American "Revolution" that didn't take place in a whole country and totally changed the way of government for it, but instead happened on a different continent, and didn't scratch the British monarchy in the slightest? Maybe you take your little uprising in the backwoods a tad too seriously? Ignoring how that would have ended if the French hadn't helped you...

      • Which forefront are you talking about? The Revolution of 1789, which took place 14 years after the English colonies in North America had their revolution?

        Credit where it is due: the American Revolution wouldn't have succeeded without assistance from the French.

        You do have to give it to the French people for really taking the American Revolution to heart and starting their own. Perhaps it wasn't as decisive as the American one, but it seems that the French are responsible for ending monoarchies in Europe.

      • Lafayette and US support (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well, french revolution has to be taken in context, it was the first in Europe with very hostile neighbours and against its own government, so it deserves credit for that, it was not that easy as simply copying American revolution. There were a lot of threats from other countries who feared this would give bad ideas to their own people which it finally did.

        By the way, I think that French helped Americans just to piss off the english and reduce England's supremacy over there.

        Finally, US governement didn't

      • Which forefront are you talking about? The Revolution of 1789, which took place 14 years after the English colonies in North America had their revolution?

        The american revolution was a bourgeois revolution; that is, bourgeois revolting against laws that prevented them from doing commerce and against taxes. Therefore it does not qualify as a true "revolution", but is rather a jacquerie led by the rich.

        Or when Napolean took over the Republic and abandoned it for another monarchy with his family in

  • Slightly out of date (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tehshen ( 794722 ) <tehshen@gmail.com> on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:25AM (#12612295)
    The article was published on the 20th, which was one day before the yearly contest, making it a whole year out of date; the results were hardly surprising, though.
  • Was the information really lacking, or was it just me? The summary summed up everything that was to be said in the article itself.

  • As usual, Europeans do odd things better than US (Score:5, Funny)

    by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:26AM (#12612313)
    This looks way more interesting than "American Idle," which isn't nearly as good as the original, "Eric Idle."

    David Letterman, though, does acknowledge that his very popular "Will It Float" segment is based on the original British "Is It Buoyant."

  • For those not in Europe.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:26AM (#12612317) Homepage Journal
    The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual contest where the countries of Europe (or, more accurately, members of the European Broadcasting Union, which includes Israel) come together, each put forward a song and performer, and have a contest.

    Generally twenty four countries make it through to the final (which is all most people watch).. four of those are automatic placements from the main contributors (UK, France, Germany, Spain) and the rest survived the semi-final.

    Then they all perform a song, most of which are hideously awful, and sometimes ham up national stereotypes in the most hysterical of manners (this year, Moldova had a crazy celtic style thrash rock song with some 90 year old woman banging a drum) .. then all the people in Europe call in and vote while a dire interlude performance is shown (this is how Riverdance became famous). After that, each country is contacted and a representative reads out the votes that country's viewers gave.. which vary between 1 and 12 points.

    Inevitably, national biases always come out. Greece and Cyprus often give each other 12 points, all the Nordic countries vote for each other, and, nowadays, all the Baltic states vote for each other too. Until recently, Greece and Turkey would never give each other any points.

    The whole contest is really an opportunity to laugh at our fellow Europeans, see some hideous songs which will never make it anywhere, and listen to some great commentary which pokes fun at the whole charade.

  • To confirm these findings, physicists plan... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:27AM (#12612318)
    ...on grinding up the contestants and firing them in a particle accelerator. I might suggest we do this with American Idol contestants.

  • Every year, the same bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BoxedFlame ( 231097 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:27AM (#12612321) Homepage
    Look, the reason you vote for culturally similar countries, is that you share taste in music with them. Obviously these former russian nations actually think they're sending something good. I for one think it's crap and I think the contributions from my neighboring countries are superior. Not because I somehow "like" these people, the music is just closer to my preferred style. There are some exceptions though, like the year Turkey won for example.
  • Olympic gymnastic and figure skating judges, especially back during the cold war when there was no doubt you had blocks of voters.

    I wonder though, is Britain more "European" because larger immigrant blocks vote for their home countrymen?

    • I wonder though, is Britain more "European" because larger immigrant blocks vote for their home countrymen?

      Given that the vast majority of British immigrants come from outside Europe (source UK government International Migration Estimates 2002) and that immigrants as a whole make up a single digit percentage of the population, it seems pretty unlikely that they would make much difference. Where immigrants do make a difference on national Eurovision votes (Germany, for example) it seems to be in countrie

  • Visualizations? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sv-Manowar ( 772313 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:30AM (#12612344) Homepage Journal

    It would be extremely interesting to see the votes mapped onto a social relationships chart, if only to confirm the groupings and the weak bonds between certain members of groups to tie them to the others.

    Doing some kind of statistical analysis based on previous year's set voting patterns and then removing their significance from the current result might actually give an idea of who was the best artist, contrary to the winner of the popular vote.

    • It does remind me somewhat of a study discussed in the book Freakonomics in which the author did statistical studies on voting in The Weakest Link. He crunched actual numbers and discovered there were some biases at work, such as:

      Hispanics had a performance bias going against them (they were voted off earlier rounds when strong players are desireable, and kept in later rounds when weaker players are desireable) and the elderly had a general bias against them (they were voted off in all phases of the game

  • You have to be kidding me... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PenguinBoyDave ( 806137 ) <david AT davidmeyer DOT org> on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:31AM (#12612360)
    I can't believe that they actually had to study this to figure it out. It has been going on for years all over the world. This falls into the "Move along, nothing to see here" category.

    I can see the next /. news posting:

    "SEC - Something isn't right at SCO"

  • In related news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by NoMoreNicksLeft ( 516230 ) <john.oyler@ c o m c a st.net> on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:32AM (#12612372) Journal
    TV executives discover elusive Higgs boson!
  • That pretty much sums this up. A research into a kitchy phenomena revealed that things you'd expect anyway are true, at least as far as this kind of pop-culture acrobatics.

    I'm not sure why this is Nature, and I'm even more confused as to why this is at Slashdot.

  • assumptions flawed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by old man moss ( 863461 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:34AM (#12612390) Homepage
    Their main assumption is sadly false: all the songs are not equally bad... some are terrible and some are just poor.


    Which is why Terry Wogan's commentary is so entertaining, and well worth a watch over dinner and a few drinks.


    BTW this years winner was Greece and France were last...

  • ...The other mainland European countries actually think it's a real contest!

    For those in the US, it's actually a large elaborate practical joke to make make people look silly.

    • ...The other mainland European countries actually think it's a real contest!

      I'm not so sure about that - how else can you explain the success of a certain Dana International [wikipedia.org] a few years ago?

      (Yes, Israel won the contest thanks to the performance of a male-to-female transsexual. You can't make this up!)

  • We need research for this?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:37AM (#12612423) Journal
    Just look at the statistics and you'd see the same thing:

    Scoreboard, final [eurovision.tv]
    Scoreboard, semi-final [eurovision.tv]

    In this case, statistics don't lie. Or at least they agree with this report, so in that case it'd lie too.

    For example, you'll see that Sweden got their two highest scores from Denmark and Finland and zero points from most others.

    This is also commonly happening in eastern europe, and yet an example of it can be seen with Croatia and Serbia & Montenegro.

    Voting on your neighbors has happened for a long time in the ESC so it's not news, and it's usually part as just a friendly gesture from the televoters and part because the countries have similar taste in music. Any watcher of this show would've noticed this fairly easily too.

    Personally I think most music there suck horribly, and don't take the competition too seriously, although it's a bit annoying when friend voting go overboard and their top scores is given to a country that has some obviously extremely poor song. But then again, maybe it's just me having a culture collision and they honestly found it was good. Europe is so diverse in cultures that it's entirely possible.

    It's kind of funny though; at least this time neither France or Germany seemed to get *any* friendship votes from their neighbors. :-)
  • Was there anything informative in that "article?"

  • I'll give the article (Score:3, Funny)

    by earthloop ( 449575 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:49AM (#12612559) Homepage
    Nil pwa

    Talk about stating the obvious!

  • In unrelated news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by MisterTeabag ( 664494 ) <senemark.yahoo@com> on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:50AM (#12612572)
    ... still no cure for cancer.

  • More Analysis... (Score:4, Informative)

    by brummie_andy ( 879006 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @11:54AM (#12612615)
    A more graphic description of the voting patterns can be found here [liacs.nl] It clearly show that us Brits (and Irish) vote for the better songs while those Southern (and Eastern) Europeans can't be trusted.

  • Eurovision, the reality (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @12:12PM (#12612815)
    It really boils down to this. Eurovision songs are by and large insipid and instantly forgettable trash composed and performed by talentless nobodies. Occasionally someone breaks the mould but not often.

    The problem is that nobody takes it seriously. If they did, they'd pit their best singers and performers against each other. Instead (at least in the UK & Ireland) it's more like a talent show with the people choosing the least worst of a handful of songs to represent the country.

    Just look at Ireland this year. They have the likes of U2, The Corrs, The Cranberries, Enya, Phil Coulter, Van Morrison and even *spit* Westlife. So who did they send to compete? Two nobodies - a 15 year old ginger four eyes and his sister to sing some dirge about "Love". The sad part is that they chose these two after a long running sub-Pop Idol kind of competition.

    So naturally when the songs are so appalling, the votes are heavily slanted to their Euro-pals. This year the finalists were heavily Eastern European so the vote reflected that. The stalwarts like the UK, France & Germany finished miserably.

    Another weird thing is observing how the songs from past years get ripped off in the following year's competition. Turkey won a couple of years back and you could still hear ripped off riffs from their entry even this year.

  • Distance-weighted adjustment (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bazman ( 4849 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @12:13PM (#12612838) Journal
    Last year I computed a distance-weighted adjustment of the Eurovision scores, on the basis that if you voted for a country far away from you, you must have really liked the song since its cultural attachments to you are weaker than a song from your neighbour. So if you like faraway songs they must be really good, and hence worthy of more marks.

    I got a map of Europe, used the locations of the capital cities as surrogate coordinates, computed the distance matrix, and reweighted the score from the Eurovision website to adjust for this.

    Here's the top 5 from my adjusted list (left) and the original list (right):

    cyprus 280 ukraine 280
    ukraine 273 serbiamontenegro 263
    greece 263 greece 252
    turkey 245 turkey 195
    serbiamontenegro 199 cyprus 170

    So Cyprus jumped four places by my system into first place!

    I should have cranked this system up again for this year, offered it to the TV companies, profit!!

    The big irony is that I had a proper scientific paper (on malaria prevalence) REJECTED by Nature this year, and then they produce this fluff! Gah!

    Baz

  • out on a limb (Score:3, Funny)

    by PainBot ( 844233 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @12:27PM (#12613005)
    Can anyone explain to a French guy what this expression means ?
    Oh and why does it alywas have to a huge argument whenever France is mentionned ?
    Last, why are PHYSICISTS qualified to perform such an analysis ? "Nuclear physicist says French painters like eating pork". Huh ?

    • Re:out on a limb (Score:3, Informative)

      by m50d ( 797211 )
      It means taking a risk. A limb sometimes means a medium-sized tree branch that may or may not take a human's weight; this may or may not be related to the saying.

      Physicists tend to be good at applying statistics to real world phenomena because they do that a lot. So if a physicist tells you something statistical you should listen to them.

  • Link to the Data (Score:4, Informative)

    by Danuvius ( 704536 ) on Monday May 23, 2005 @12:46PM (#12613228)
    The article is devoid of data. The text of the study can be found here though: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/?0505071 [arxiv.org]
  • Can someone just explain two things about Eurovision - why has the UK been consistently entering shit songs and shit performers for several years straight? is this on purpose? its not like we don't have any real singers - there have been some good ones, wtf is going on? And WTF is Israel doing in this contest?
    • The same as turkey: they are both countries of the European Broadcastin Association.

    • why has the UK been consistently entering shit songs and shit performers for several years straight? is this on purpose?

      Because winning Eurovision means that that country gets to host it next year, which is extremely expensive. Rumours abound that Ireland's winning spree during the 1990's almost bankrupted RTE, the Irish state broadcaster. Winning is fine if you're some newly-independent state or if you're trying to promote your country to the world for tourism or political purposes. It's expensive b

  • So what exactly makes this any worse than the endless hash-rehash froth of the "dream factory" ?
    It's a chance to watch something different on TV, a break from other 364 days of fake reality shows and marketing-written soaps.

    Some take the contest more seriously than others of course, but if you don't love it, you love to hate it.

    I actually have a couple of points to offer:
    • The contest is the focuspoint of Eurovision parties all over...if you are not invited to a Eurovision Party, you are a social dud. And

  • Everybody loves them in Europe - from Ireland to England to France to Germany to Spain to Italy!

    I was just watching one of their 2004 concerts in Benidorm, Spain. Somebody threw a teddy bear up on the stage for Andrea (she gets a LOT of teddy bears - at the Ischgl performance, there was a stack of 3 or 4 of them on the drum riser!). Jim started playing a piano ditty, she started dancing with the teddy bear. The audience began singing "Ole! Ole!" and the rest of the band then jumped in and played along.

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