At Home with John and Debbie

Debbie keeps threatening to list the myths about Japan that are not true (trains are always on time, it’s punishingly expensive, you can only get scary Japanese food, etc.). Although I’ve promised to stop thinking about Eurovision for the year, I have to get these off my chest.

1. Political voting

As Ukraine gave Russia 12 points on Saturday, Terry Wogan gave a hollow laugh and said “Ukraine want to just be absolutely sure that the old electricity and the oil flow through”. And hence a nation of pub bores gets to complain that the UK can’t win any more because of ‘political voting’ or ‘bloc voting’.

(I appreciate the irony of course: nobody can bore like me on the subject of Eurovision)

But the fact is, it’s extremely unlikely that politics is affecting Eurovision scoring. For that to be true you’d have to believe:

• That powerful people truly believe that the results of a song contest might affect foreign policy
• That these same people have the ability to rig a phone vote (admittedly this second part isn’t beyond the realms of possibility)

Or, you’d have to believe that ordinary people in their millions are thinking to themselves “Well, I liked that British entry, but with Russia renegotiating their trade tariffs next month, it’s really not worth the risk. I’ll vote for them.”

No.

You don’t need conspiracies to explain the apparent reciprocal voting. There are two explanations.

The first is that of cultural similarity. Croatia and Bosnia are neighbours. Of course they’re going to have a similar taste in music. Throughout that region, the kids are going nuts for ‘Turbo Folk’, a cross between happy house and traditional Baltic folk that sounds ridiculous to Western European ears. Their taste is not like our taste. The same argument applies to other blocs. This is entirely fair and I believe the overall result is fair because of it.
The second reason is less fair, but unavoidable without going back to the eminently corruptible jury system. That reason is immigration. For example, in Greece the contest is extraordinarily popular, and the UK has a massive population of visiting Greek students who watch the show and take the opportunity to vote for their country. Hence, the UK always gives Greece a strong vote. For similar reasons, Germany always gives Turkey a good score.

Former Soviet countries were flooded with ethnic Russians by Stalin’s policies, which supports both reasons. In fact anecdotal evidence suggests that the people of former Soviet states have a great deal of resentment towards Russia. But they share a language and a cultural heritage (each country’s native culture having been all but eradicated) and it shows in their voting. These people truly are voting for the songs.

A poster on the Digital Spy forums (carnoch04) gives a compelling illustration that bloc voting isn’t as significant as it’s made out to be, by compiling the scores if we disregard votes from all the Balkan, former Soviet and Eastern Bloc countries:

1. Armenia 109 (finished 4th)
2. Russia 95 (1st)
3. Norway 93 (5th)
4 Serbia 90 (6th)
5 Ukraine 86 (2nd)

A third reason is that of general prejudice. Of course it’s a factor, and the UK may well be the Millwall Town of Europe: “nobody likes us and we don’t care”. Perhaps I’m an optimist, but I don’t believe this factor is all that significant. If people liked our performance, they’d overcome their animosity.
So Wogan’s wrong. I don’t care how long he’s been involved, he’s still wrong, as are Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh. To blame our failure to win on this is sour grapes.
2. Greece and Cyprus have always given each other 12 points

In fact in 1996, Cyprus gave Greece 10 points, and in 1995 Greece gave Cyprus 8 points.

3. The UK deserved to do better this year

Every country gets to award points to 9 countries (giving each one 1,2,3,4,5,6,8,10 or 12 points) so in order to get a single point, a country has to decide that there are fewer than 9 songs better than yours.

Andy Abraham gave a solid performance of a solid song, but the competition was strong. We counted 8 songs that  prompted a spontaneous round of applause from our Leamington Spa audience, and I could name a few more that are more memorable than the UK entry.

Of the top three, I could hum you the chorus from the Greek and Ukrainian entries right now. They were streets ahead of the UK song. I didn’t rate the winning Russian song much myself, but let’s take a look at the performer’s track record (with thanks to another Digital Spy poster):

Dima Bilan - History

• Graduated from Gnesins Musical College as a classical vocal performer.
• 2003, released his debut album titled Nochnoy Huligan (Night Hooligan).
• Attempted to reach Eurovision previously with the song “Not That Simple” in 2005, finishing in second place at the Russian national selection.
• December 2005, Bilan received two golden gramophones for the song “Ty dolzjna ryadom byt’” in Saint Petersburg and Almaty.
• Voted Showbusiness Man of the Year.
• Record tracks for the musical Peter Pan in the USA
• Took part in “International Music Awards” in Kiev where he was honored as “Singer of the Year”.
• Took second place in Eurovision 2006 with the dark pop song “Never Let You Go” (1st was Lordi)
• July 2006 took part in the biggest musical event in Russia, “The Red Summer”, where he performed on stage with Shakira, The Black Eyed Peas and t.A.T.u.
• September 2006, for second year in a row, Dima Bilan won Artist of the Year and Song of the Year at MTV Russian Music Awards.
• November 2nd Bilan represented Russia at MTV EMA in Copenhagen.
• 15 November 2006 Bilan received award for Best Selling Russian Artist and performed at the World Music Awards in London along with Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Rihanna, Nelly Furtado and Bob Sinclair.
• February of 2007 started to record his first international album in English in Los Angeles, Miami and in Philadelphia in collaboration with producer Timbaland.
• First single released from new album topped the eastern European charts for 8 weeks. Video was shot in London by Trudy Bellinger (who made videos for Girls Aloud, Sugababes and Sophie Ellis Bextor).
• 4 October premiered his second single from the forthcoming album, Amnesia, at the MTV Russia Music Awards 2007, winning “Best Performer”", “Best Song” and – for the third time in three years - “Best Artist”.
• 20 February went to Miami and recorded a few tracks for his Spanish album with producer Rudy Perez, this album will include a duet with Nelly Furtado.
• Represented Russia in the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Believe” accompanied by Hungarian violinist Edvin Marton and Russian world champion figure skater Evgeni Plushenko (and he won).

The problem is, British people still think the whole world dances to their tune. Although a lot of Euro-pop is performed in the English language, a typical European won’t have heard of many of our celebrities, and they have megastars of their own who are popular among vast populations across multiple countries.

Not only that, but Dima Bilan toured Europe promoting his song in the weeks running up to the competition, so the voting public in many countries would have been exposed to this song — performed by an established act they already knew well — many times before the competition itself.

We sent a talent contest runner up. They send Micheal Jackson. We do badly partly because we’re unpopular. But we also do badly because we don’t take the event seriously. Every year we like to pretend that we’re taking it seriously this time — but you only have to compare our efforts with those of other countries to see that we don’t.
4. It’s a waste of license payers’ money

The BBC contributes approximately £180,000 - extraordinarily good value for money for over 8 hours of popular programming.

5. The UK should drop out

Well, it wouldn’t make the show any less entertaining for me, but it would be a sad day, and it would make us look like sore losers and killjoys. Just like those killjoy sore losers Austria and Italy.

What on earth would dropping out achieve? Even when we lose, we get to participate in something glorious and bouncy and shiny and fun.

6. It’s a load of camp old nonsense

Well, that bit’s true, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 20:46 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.