Those of you in Europe reading this are probably wondering what I’m doing writing a post on something like this, but for everyone else who’s interested in getting a taste of European culture, you may want to check out the Eurovision Song Contest website. The video above is Azerbaijan, but all the participating countries can be found on this website.
It’s hard to explain in just a few words what it’s all about, but it’s in the 54th year and the number of countries participating is very impressive. In Soviet times, stories came out of people listening on shortwave radios in secret, and and it being an important connection with the outside world for them. In modern times, the remaining Soviet block countries are putting forth some of the best performances.
Every year the contest is hosted by the country who won the previous year. Eurovision 2009 is being hosted by Russia in Moscow.
While all the videos are available for viewing online, either directly on their website or via YouTube, part of the attraction is to watch the contest unfold and see which countries vote for one another. While watching it, those of us in Europe can call an overpriced phone number to vote. Regions in Europe tend to form alliances, and various countries have special relationships with one another. Countries are not allowed to vote for themselves, but there are stories of bus loads of people crossing borders to vote from other countries. Some countries like the UK always seem to lose, no matter what. Everyone wonders why the announcements are still in French as well as English. We all wait to see if the Serbs and Croats will vote for each other, and so on. It’s a real lesson in European geography, politics and alliances.
Every country sponsors a performance, and many of them are really good! Others are not so good. Two years ago Finland won with what some people considered the worst video of the evening, as if people voted for them just to make fun of Eurovision. Eurovision is where ABBA got their start in the music world.
In past years every country got to make a performance on the night of the show, but in the last few years there are too many countries, so they have a complicated set of rules for semi-finals and finals. The semi-finals are past (I’m watching the last one as I type this), but the finals are this Saturday. Consider waching, live streams should be available from the website linked to above. If you can’t watch the show live, have a look at some of the Youtube videos.
Glad you guys are getting into this year’s competition. If you’d like to see what you look like as a classic Eurovision act, check out http://www.eurovision.bt.com/eurovision-yourself/
and you can als find out more on our campaign to bring back Eurovision glory for the UK!
Does everybody know about the Putumayo compilation CDs? They are great!