Eurovisual

I have a sneaking regard for the Eurovision Song Contest. It is rather like one's parents' stories about the war; having found them tedious and annoying for the first thirty years, sometime in your fourth decade you change your mind and decide they are interesting, and social history, and not so much justification for homicide as they once seemed.

However, unlike your parents' stories about the war, Eurovision has actually changed. And with every passing year it becomes more camp, more bizarre, and more incomprehensible.

It has long been hard to understand by what criterion Israel is part of Europe. Indeed, my understanding of Israel was that it was created by people who needed to escape Europe, so even its desire to be involved is pretty baffling. Geographically (which is often how countries are defined) Israel appears to be in Northern Africa or the Middle East. Really not Europe. Yet there they are, upon occasion even there they are winning. Strange.

Less strange but more annoying, is the addition of every tiny country which used to be in Russia and now wants to be in the EU. Again, this is all very bizarre - they made a great deal of fuss about not being in Russia, but five minutes out and they want to join another pan-European community. It makes little if any sense. If they think Brussels is going to allow them their own sense of individual nationalism, they clearly haven't yet been through the designated food definition laws which have got the English Press so aeriated so often in the last 35 years. If they think Brussels is going to dole out the profits of capitalism so as to help them to catch up to the West, they must think that Western Europe has no sense of self-preservation or self-promotion, which is not a conclusion history would necessarily lead to.

However, this would not matter if they weren't busily voting tactically in the Eurovision Song Contest that it has become practically a foregone conclusion that a) an Eastern European former Communist State will win and b) nobody West of the Iron Curtain will get a look-in.

This fills my soul with dark inchoate rage.

Let us for a moment discuss the music. The music was - throughout one's childhood - nearly uniformly awful, but the songs that won were sometimes quite perky little pop songs. The point was that there was always one song that was okay - and this all-right-tune, regardless of the petty politics of Malta and Spain and Certain Other Countries always voting for each other, won. It was the law.

Now, however, there is far too much politics. And it isn't right. Primarily because it strips us of even a remote chance of winning - worse, of a remote chance of making a decent showing on the score board. This flies in the face of all Eurovision tradition; Nul Point throughout is the province of the Scandinavians. But the real problem is not the dodgy tactical voting - although I would like to point out that these people are using the tools of democracy to make a laughing stock of us - no, the real problem is that there are around a million of these itty bitty teeny weeny totty dotty Used-To-Be-In-Russia countries. If you have about ten countries in a contest, then you have a statistical hope of winning every ten years or so. Once you are up to 49 countries - well, you do the sums. I think England should start watching again in about 2046.

When I rule the world, I will fix this in a simple manner, or by making the votes of countries proportionate to their population. Since we have always been - with Germany - the industrial heart of Europe, with the resultantly dense population, and now we have started another wave of immigration, I figure England's will be the only vote worth having. We will once again rule the musical waves and Hurrah for Us. Alternatively, we should start breaking down our countries into smaller components, allowing us to rig the voting. The UK has four parts for a kick off, without getting into the whole question of the Isles of Wight, Scilly and Man, and the Channel Islands. France has Brittany, Spain has Catalonia, and Germany could claim to be about five countries right off the bat.

The Eurovision Contest, however, has another plan. This year there will be not one but TWO semi-finals. This will bring a certain result, which is - all Western Europe will be out before the final. Western Europe will then not watch the final in droves. Eastern Europe - which uses the Contest primarily as a platform for national advertising for tourism etc - will have lost their target audience and be Annoyed. And next year, I suppose the Contest Planners hope, one or two of the Westerners will be allowed back in. I don't know that this will work, but I do assume it's their plan. And if it doesn't work - well, who cares? Let's have our own competition; something we do best; something only we Brits can do - live costume drama anybody?