The one where Eurovision turned into a farce
We got in from the girls dance show late on Saturday night, and sat down with a huge proportion of the rest of the nation to join in the annual idiotic spectacle that is the “Eurovision Song Contest”. For those around the rest of the world, it's an annual competition where each country in Europe puts forward a band to play a song, and all of the countries get to vote.
I only really caught the last half an hour of the live acts, but watched the re-cap at the end to choose who I was going to vote forand started pressing numbers on the phone immediately when I saw Poland.You see, Eurovision isn't supposed to be serious (at least in my mind). The more crazy, idiotic, and entertaining the act, the more likely people are to vote for them. Most people set the night aside to have friends round, and have a few drinks while laughing at the various numbers.
On the night, the whole thing was won by a transvestite from Austriaa 6ft+ tall bearded guy in a lovely dress, singing Beegees style falsetto. Yes, it was weird, and entertaining, but I wondered why quite so many countries were voting for him/her.
The answer came on Sunday evening, when the voting numbers were released. It turned out the majority of the audience across Europe had done the same as mevoted for Poland. Unfortunately the voting process for Eurovision is somewhat class based and antiquatedthe audience vote in each country only counts for half of the resultthere is also a jury in each country that counts for the other half. In each country where Poland had been voted firstby the people (and Austria nowhere), the jury voted Austria first, and Poland dead last.
If it had been one or two countries, you could have explained it as coincidence. It wasn't one or two countries thoughit was perhaps a third of them.
You can invent whatever conspiracy theory you like to explain what went on (and believe me, there are many flying around already), but I just think it was nice to know that the voting public chose the craziest act of the night, rather than a liberal statement to Russia about acceptance of homosexuality