There’s a Eurovision row goin’ on… and UK could lose automatic final place

By mofgimmers on May 28th, 2008 15 comments

Never trust a man who plucks his eyebrows…

There’s a row surrounding the Eurovision Song Contest. There’s cries of ‘no fun’, unfair play, sour grapes, political voting… and now, the UK could lose its guaranteed place in the Eurovision Song Contest final following criticism that the event is becoming increasingly biased against western European countries.

Eurovision organisers have been speaking to the Guardian and one of the issues being discussed is the UK’s guaranteed place in the final. Now, you may not know this, but the UK is one of the major funders of the show, so of course, feathers could be ruffled if any moves are made ‘against’ us. Someone at the Beeb said that it has an “open mind” about the controversial proposal, which, if implemented, could see the UK’s Eurovision entry have to qualify and potentially fail to make the final for the first time in the event’s history.

The UK, Germany, France and Spain – the “big four” Eurovision countries who get an automatic place in the final because they contribute the most funding – all came in the bottom 10. Former X Factor finalist Andy Abraham’s ‘Even If’, came joint last.

With this, the latest in a chain of Eastern Bloc results, there’s a growing murmur that the UK may never win Eurovision again and, even led Sir Terry Wogan to say he’s thinking of jacking the programme in. It seems that the public are becoming less interested as a result, with this year’s ratings be down, with 7.1 million viewers on Saturday, compared with last year’s 8.7 million.

So what does the head of Eurovision, Svante Stockselius, have to say? Well, he says: “Every year, we evaluate and debrief each contest. We will discuss these things there. We did a couple of big changes to this year’s event, with the introduction of two semi-finals. We do not exclude that we will look into different changes for next year.”

When asked if the poor performance of the “big four” countries could be down to other countries purposely voting against them, he replied: “It could be.” Stockselius added: “I don’t think it is jealousy, but it might be that people think: ‘Why should we vote for them when they are automatically in the final? Lets vote for someone else’. It could be something like that.”

Of course, the big four becoming unseeded could see them withdrawing a lot of sponsorship for the competition, but that doesn’t worry Stockselius who thinks that the scale of sponsorship the contest now attracts would mean that the show could carry on without this money.

“Of course we would have to look into funding, but we have such big sponsorship now it could manage,” he said. “It would be a point of discussion.”

What seems to stick in the BBC craw is that it would pointless giving 3 hours of primetime airtime to a show not featuring the UK. However, Stockselius said: “That is a question 38 other broadcasters have to face.”

What do you think? Should we bothering entering again? Are the Eurovision bosses calling our bluff? Is political voting ruining Eurovision?

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Dave

Go to a group system for the qualifiers – rather than the top x songs getting through, it should be the top y songs from each “region”. That way you only get so many Balkans, so many Scandinavians etc. etc. Although they will undoubtedly continue to vote for each other, at least with fewer of each bloc in the final the effect should be less pronounced.

Funnily enough they already have the groups in order to set up the semis – much like with a football draw they had six “pots” of countries that tend to vote for each other, and picked sequentially (so half of each pot was in each semi). So it wouldn’t be a major step.

It would theoretically also make better telly, as the “semis” would be the contest against your local rivals and then in the final you are guaranteed a good geographic spread across Europe to get people tuning in.
chris

This years semi finals helped minimise political voting in the semi’s, which was shown by the increase in western and scandanavian qualifiers. However all this good work was undone when the decision was made to allow all countries to vote in the final. There were now fewer balkan countries available to vote on, but the same number of voting countries as last year. Therefore balkan countries who partcipated in the final got even more votes as they were more concentrated!
The Eurovision committee need to seriously review their policies. I remember the bad old days of jury’s voting… I’d take that anyday now. I doubt even Katrina and the Waves would have made top half this year with the current political voting.
Maybe UK should split in to England, Scotland, Wales and N.I and all give each other 12. Or better still, split in to Counties – that would just about even it up!
Sir Terry is right, it used to be funny when Greece and Cyprus gave each other 12 points every year, but it’s a bit of a joke when balkan states give russia 12 points, ukraine 10 and armenia 8. Do they get together a few weeks before to decide how to vote? I could understand if they sang in their native language and neighbouring conutries connected with them linguistically… but they all sing in English anyway!
I love the Eurovision and I will continue to watch it, but it’s sad to see a show, which 600 million people watch, turned in to a relic of the cold war!
Andy

The Eurovision Song Contest has traditionally been the most politically biased programme you would ever see on television. ‘El-Tel’ says it year after year and it’s true.

The favours-based voting has been evident for years, depending on which Balkan country needs to appease another (Bosnia Herzogovena, Croatia, Serbia et al), which countries are currently engaged in unpopular foreign politics (the result following our invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq springs to mind), which countries are desperate to avoid all-out war (eg Greece and Turkey), which countries regard it as the final hope for keeping their borders friendly, in fact ANYTHING, EXCEPT the quality of song.

And could someone please tell me which part of Europe is Israel in? When I was at school I was taught that Israel was in the middle east.

I say pull-out now and withdraw the funding and technical know-how and let the eastern-europeans scratch away at it until it’s dead. Germany and France would soon follow suit.

Then perhaps we could start a NEW contest – a night of good old fashioned camp entertainment, perhaps called ‘A Song for Lovely Europeans’ and restrict membership to the original dozen-or-so founding countries.

Of course ‘El-Tel’ would have to stay.
James

UK could lose automatic inclusion from this sorry spectacle? Wonderful! Deo gratias!
Liann

The UK could lose their spot? Woo! I say, pull out, take our funding and leave them to it!
It’s become the biggest load of rubbish anyway – we could have the best song in the world and it still wouldn’t matter – they wouldn’t vote for us!
John

Pull Out. Call their bluff. It is a complete farce. Total waste of time.
http://www.cheekymonkeypictures.co.uk Ada,

Let’s just pull out of the whole boring sham.
Nick M

Remember Miss World? If we and another big country pull out it’ll be the beginning of the end for Eurovision. I think it’ll be a good thing, its a hangover from the 60′s and we have better things to do.
Nick Le Santo

This is supposedly a song contest. It`s remit does not include politics, wacky theatricals, and bizarre music. But these are the things which now define it. There is no point in subscribing to a song contest which is manifestly not a song contest.
Paul

The Balkan countries hate each other and have been committing genocide and other atrocities against each other for centuries.

If the Eurovision song contest can be used to bring these countries together then it has to be a good thing.

Of course, it makes me wonder how much they must hate us…….
Fran

Since when were Georgia and Azerbaijan in Europe? It seems every year, ‘Europe’ constitutes more and more of what i thought was the middle east? Azerbaijan’s neighbour is Iran and id love to meet anyone who thinks thats part of Europe.
I’ve watched the show for about a decade now and whilst no one in Britain takes it seriously, including myself, it’s always nice to see the possibility of a win, and whilst our songs of late have probably been unworthy of winning, how well they could do is completely masked by the voting system.
I wouldnt make a dog listen to the song Russia came out with…. all this said, it’s jsut another classic case of the transfer of money from the economy into ‘Europe’, maybe the big four should just cut funding entirely, not just reduce it?
Rachel

yes there is a wide range of sponsors, but these sponsors are more than happy to let the big four fork up most of the cash or they would have found alternative funding years ago.
RayB

Pull out, we’ll watch ‘Only Fools and Horses’ as usual!
lee harvey osmond

Eurovision is a honking great success just as it is.

Once upon a time the European Broadcasting Union decided that it would be fun for all its members to hold a joint live TV show so that everybody could experiment with rebroadcasting other people’s TV signals that had originated in other formats. The event needed to be something people would want to watch, so that there would be an incentive for the engineers to deliver something that worked; and it needed to be something not tied to Cold War politics, and it couldn’t be something like a football tournament, because the football people would have wanted money. “A popular music show where everybody gets to see all the entries, and to keep people watching, we’ll have a vote at the end” seems to have been the most popular proposal.

And so all these decades later we complain that the music’s horrible and that there’s all this bloc voting going on. Well … so what? Same as it ever was; except nowadays the pictures and sound are perfect, so all Europe’s broadcasting engineers seem to be on the ball.

Even the engineers from countries that technically aren’t in Europe. After all, if the engineers were going to get it wrong, what would you rather they broke? Eurovision, or … the World Cup Final? The next coronation or royal wedding? Next round of moon landings? This way, we know we can get viewable live TV from some obscure central Asian country we’ve never heard of, and won’t until we draw them in a World Cup qualifying group … and we know that game will be televised.
Toymao

For those who wonder why non-European countries are in it: this is not a European song contest, this a EBU members song context, and that’s important. EBU’ is an organization of European television broadcasters founded decades ago (the international broadcast was called Eurovision), and its members participate in the song contest (this is just an unimportant side action of the organization btw).

Israel is a member, because of obvious reasons it couldn’t be part of any Asian or Middle-Eastern broadcaster organization dominated by hostile Arab televisions.

Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan etc.are fresh members, but sorry, Georgia, Azerbaijan ARE European country, Europe “is bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the west by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by the Mediterranean Sea, to the southeast by the Caucasus Mountains, the Black Sea and the waterways connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. To the east, Europe is generally divided from Asia by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, and by the Caspian Sea.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe) Following this argument, Malta, Cyprus, half of Greece could not be considered as Europe.

The EBU has a lot of non-European members like Egypt, Libya, Tunisis, Algeria, Morocco in Africa; and Israel, Jordan, Lebanon in the Middle-East (which is part of Asia).