Unless you’ve been living in a bubble for the past month, you’ll probably know that the Eurovision Song Contest is soon to be upon us – next week, to be precise, with the hopes of the UK resting on Jade Ewen and Andrew Lloyd Webber (although to be honest the UK has done so poorly in recent years that even finishing in the top 15 would frankly be a cause for celebration).

And if you’re an ardent fan of the annual music spectacle – and trust me there are thousands of them, scattered all across the continent – you’ll doubtless have been following the whole build-up to the contest online, right from when the first entry – from Albania – was chosen back in December (yes, that’s December 2008, some of these countries sure like to get everything sorted out early). There are loads of websites dedicated to Eurovision, although the BBC’s official site is particularly good in this regard – and they’ve just launched their newest feature guaranteed to keep Euro-freaks happy for hours.

Called simply Eurohistory, it is an interactive map of Europe which allows you to view the results from every year, country by country – on one hand telling you who gave which country which points, on the other telling you who that particular country voted for.

For example, click on United Kingdom 2008 and you can see that Andy Abraham got a measly 14 points, 8 from Ireland and 6 from current one contest wonders San Marino. But if you want to go back even further, though and discover for example who gave German Eurovision legend Joy Fleming points in 1975, or who indeed Germany gave points to, then you can also do that. It even tells you whether a country’s song in a particular year was a ballad, mid-tempo or uptempo, and whether it was sung by a soloist or group. It is, in short, a Eurovision trivia buff’s dream.

But it does also serve another purpose, as a quick glance at voting patterns over the past few years show. Who did Ukraine give points to in 2008? Oh look, they favoured Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia. Who did Norway give points to? Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland, no less.

Let’s jump back to 2007. Well I never, Serbia have given some pretty high scores to Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Slovenia. While Moldova have been more than generous to Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine and – blimey – Romania, giving them their top mark of ‘douze points’.Could this nifty piece of kit possibly be used to sift out patterns of neighbourly voting? Heaven forbid.

Of course if you find that all way too complicated for your liking, then why not try the Eurovision Scoreboard simulator instead at http://www.escnation.com/? You can adjust the settings on this one to your liking, so can estimate each country’s chance of success, allow for neighbourly voting or just let the simulator make it all up as it goes along. It then picks 10 finalists from each semi and proceeds to act out actual Eurovision-style voting according to your preferences. So you can either try and fix it so your favourite country wins or if you’re feeling really radical, remove all the preferences and watch as Greece randomly gives 12 points to the likes of Ireland and an utter no-hoper of a song ends up top of the scoreboard. Hours of fun guaranteed.