What a bad Serbian singer tells us about the utter futility of the European dream
By EDWARD HEATHCOAT AMORY
15th May 2007
Daily Mail
THE RESULTS OF SATURDAY'S EUROVISION SONG CONTEST - Serbia won.....and Europeans don't seem to like the Irish, as the great European public, watching the show live on TV, gave Ireland the least amount of points.
Country...Points
1 Serbia 268
2 Ukraine 235
3 Russia 207
4 Turkey 163
5 Bulgaria 157
6 Belarus 145
7 Greece 139
8 Armenia 138
9 Hungary 128
10 Moldova 109
11 Bosnia/Herzegovina 106
12 Georgia 97
13 Romania 84
14 Macedonia 73
15 Slovenia 66
16 Latvia 54
17 Finland 53
18 Sweden 51
19 Germany 49
20 Spain 43
21 Lithuania 28
22 France 19
23 United Kingdom 19
24 Republic of Ireland 5
These days in the Eurovision Song Contest, it's now how good or bad a song is that determines the amount of votes it gets. Now it's usually political voting. Neighbours all vote for each other - Sweden, Finland, Norway, denmark and Iceland usually give each other loads of points, as do Portugal and Spain, or Ireland and the UK (although on Saturday Ireland gave the UK 7 points but the UK didn't give them any).
The UK's only points came from two fellow English-speaking nations - Ireland and Malta.
On Saturday, Cyprus gave Greece, predictably, the maximum 12 points - as the Cypriot vote announcer was about to read out who was getting the 12 points from the Cypriot voters, hundreds of people in the crowd actually shouted out (wearily) "Greece!". Sure enough, a second later, Greece were given the 12 points, with much booing from the crowd.
Serbia only won because it kept getting loads of votes from fellow Balkan nations - Bosnia & Hezegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro.
In the old days, good songs won the Eurovision and bad songs did badly.
These days, the quality of a song doesn't matter. You win because neighbouring countries voted for you.
It's also interesting to note that NO Western European country finished in the Top 10.
****************************************************
Serb standard: Eurovision's shock winner, Marija Serifovic, representing Serbia. It was also the first time Serbia competed in the competition as an independent nation. It previously took part as the nation known as Serbia & Montenegro, though the two split apart last year
Razum da gubim, jer stvarnost i ne primecujem' (or to translate from the Serbo-Croat, "I'm losing my mind, pushing reality out of sight").
This lyric from the Serbian winner of this weekend's Eurovision Song Contest neatly summed up my own view of the experience.
Not that I believe Britain deserved to win. Our national representatives, Scooch, performed a kind of musical Carry On Up The 747, as they pretended to be trolley dolleys and doled out sadly suggestive innuendoes in blue suits which even Ryanair would have rejected as too tacky.
But as I watched, incredulously, the Serbian entry romp home, it became apparent that Eurovision has something serious to teach us, if we can face listening.
Its message, ironically for a contest that was set up to promote European unity, is that a united Europe ruled from Brussels is more of a pipe dream than ever, as nationalism remains the driving force in both politics and music across the Continent.
Marija Serifovic, the Serbian singer, was - even allowing for cultural differences and my limited musical taste - beyond bad. Plump and unprepossessing, sartorially challenged, barely able to sing and equipped with a truly boring song, there is no possible objective explanation for her victory.
Ms Serifovic, who is now apparently about to embark on a tour of six European nations - hopefully not including Britain - won with 268 points because she benefited from the Balkan Block Vote.
She was awarded a maximum 12 points by Croatia, Bosnia And Herzegovina and Macedonia. Surely it was no coincidence that all these nations - and Serbia - were, until recently part of the old Communist Yugoslavia.
Voting in the Eurovision is no longer the preserve of a privileged elite of judges, but of the great European public. And the public back their neighbours, casting their votes for narrow regional affinities, in the knowledge that their neighbours will return the favour by voting for them.
The truth is that there is no wider European cultural identity, merely a series of localised voting blocks. This is not a oneoff phenomenon, nor is it confined to the wooded hills of the Balkans. It's endemic throughout Eurovision and across Europe.
You don't have to take my word for this. There have - and this is not a joke - been a series of heavyweight academic studies of Eurovision bias.
I was particularly taken by the work of Derek Gatherer, sometime lecturer in molecular genetics, who last year published a study of these "collusive voting alliances".
Mr Gatherer took time out of his statistical analysis to assure readers that the Eurovision is not "an outdated farrago of dubious taste born in an era of naive enthusiasm for European unity", but is "an important cultural phenomenon meriting academic study". So he's not wasting his time, then.
He identifies the crucial regional alliances; the all-powerful Balkan Bloc (former Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece etc), the Viking Empire (Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Norway), and the Warsaw Pact (Russia, Poland, the Ukraine). Since the turn of the millennium, nearly all Eurovision victories can be traced back to these alliances.
Sorry Scooch, but you never stood a chance. And nor for that matter did the much better German entry, the critical success of the contest, Roger Cicero singing "It's women who rule the world". He came 19th, four places in front of Britain.
Britain's entry - Scooch - finished 2nd-bottom, above Ireland and level on points with France. That's not only because the song wasn't very good, but because the UK isn't part of a Eurovision bloc, with many neighbouring countries voting for us
This sad state of affairs - and yes, I do think it's sad that we haven't won since Katrina And The Waves with Love Shine A Light two days after Tony Blair entered Downing Street in 1997 - is in many ways a parallel of the situation in the EU.
The two organisations were founded at roughly the same time, for similar reasons. The European Coal And Steel Community began in 1951. Eurovision - set up like the EEC by dreamers who believed in a united cultural and political Europe - grew from modest beginnings in 1955.
And as with the EEC, Britain joined Eurovision a little later than everyone else.
Eurovision - like the EU - was supposed to see the gradual disappearance of narrowly nationalist European cultural barriers and the growth of a pan-European culture. It hasn't happened. In fact, Europe seems to be becoming more nationalist.
And this is also, unfortunately, true of Brussels. The EU may have grown massively in power and influence, but within its creaking bureaucratic embrace, every nation manoeuvres ruthlessly for national and regional advantage.
So we have a ridiculous European Parliament with two Parliamentary Chambers, one in Strasbourg and the other in Brussels.
We have the French illegally banning British beef for many years and Brussels unable and unwilling to do anything about it.
We have Germany using every trick in the book to prevent foreigners - other Europeans, or anyone else - buying into its industrial and commercial base.
We have Italy and Spain, determined to protect their textile industries, manipulating Brussels with the result that British consumers pay more for clothes and shoes.
We have every country fighting its corner, every European Commissioner fighting for their country, and the European ideal no more than a tattered fig leaf to cover this giant bureaucratic gravy train.
The other respect in which Eurovision and the EU are similar is that the larger countries pay the bills, but the smaller countries increasingly call the shots, because there are more of them. So both Eurovision and the EU are funded by the Big Four - Britain, Germany, Spain and France.
Meanwhile, the smaller nations are happy to spend our money in their countries, to send their citizens to our country to do the jobs that lazy Britons don't want, and, incidentally, to benefit from our overwhelmingly more generous welfare state, education system, and health care. But we can't complain - we're all citizens of Europe now.
There is no obvious solution to the Eurovision mess, but it doesn't really matter. After all, it is only a song contest and only once a year that we have the opportunity to listen to a band of Ukrainians - whose outfits suggested escapees from an audition for role of the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz - intoning: "To dance or not to dance . . . it's not a question."
But the EU is much more significant. More than half our laws are made in Brussels and, as a parting shot, Tony Blair wants to sign us up to a European Constitution which will make matters much worse.
So please Mr Blair, stop pushing reality out of sight, and accept the Eurovision message - that there is no point in trying to create a political EU while the people of Europe cling so fiercely to their national and regional identities.
dailymail.co.uk
By EDWARD HEATHCOAT AMORY
15th May 2007
Daily Mail
THE RESULTS OF SATURDAY'S EUROVISION SONG CONTEST - Serbia won.....and Europeans don't seem to like the Irish, as the great European public, watching the show live on TV, gave Ireland the least amount of points.
Country...Points
1 Serbia 268
2 Ukraine 235
3 Russia 207
4 Turkey 163
5 Bulgaria 157
6 Belarus 145
7 Greece 139
8 Armenia 138
9 Hungary 128
10 Moldova 109
11 Bosnia/Herzegovina 106
12 Georgia 97
13 Romania 84
14 Macedonia 73
15 Slovenia 66
16 Latvia 54
17 Finland 53
18 Sweden 51
19 Germany 49
20 Spain 43
21 Lithuania 28
22 France 19
23 United Kingdom 19
24 Republic of Ireland 5
These days in the Eurovision Song Contest, it's now how good or bad a song is that determines the amount of votes it gets. Now it's usually political voting. Neighbours all vote for each other - Sweden, Finland, Norway, denmark and Iceland usually give each other loads of points, as do Portugal and Spain, or Ireland and the UK (although on Saturday Ireland gave the UK 7 points but the UK didn't give them any).
The UK's only points came from two fellow English-speaking nations - Ireland and Malta.
On Saturday, Cyprus gave Greece, predictably, the maximum 12 points - as the Cypriot vote announcer was about to read out who was getting the 12 points from the Cypriot voters, hundreds of people in the crowd actually shouted out (wearily) "Greece!". Sure enough, a second later, Greece were given the 12 points, with much booing from the crowd.
Serbia only won because it kept getting loads of votes from fellow Balkan nations - Bosnia & Hezegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro.
In the old days, good songs won the Eurovision and bad songs did badly.
These days, the quality of a song doesn't matter. You win because neighbouring countries voted for you.
It's also interesting to note that NO Western European country finished in the Top 10.
****************************************************
Serb standard: Eurovision's shock winner, Marija Serifovic, representing Serbia. It was also the first time Serbia competed in the competition as an independent nation. It previously took part as the nation known as Serbia & Montenegro, though the two split apart last year
Razum da gubim, jer stvarnost i ne primecujem' (or to translate from the Serbo-Croat, "I'm losing my mind, pushing reality out of sight").
This lyric from the Serbian winner of this weekend's Eurovision Song Contest neatly summed up my own view of the experience.
Not that I believe Britain deserved to win. Our national representatives, Scooch, performed a kind of musical Carry On Up The 747, as they pretended to be trolley dolleys and doled out sadly suggestive innuendoes in blue suits which even Ryanair would have rejected as too tacky.
But as I watched, incredulously, the Serbian entry romp home, it became apparent that Eurovision has something serious to teach us, if we can face listening.
Its message, ironically for a contest that was set up to promote European unity, is that a united Europe ruled from Brussels is more of a pipe dream than ever, as nationalism remains the driving force in both politics and music across the Continent.
Marija Serifovic, the Serbian singer, was - even allowing for cultural differences and my limited musical taste - beyond bad. Plump and unprepossessing, sartorially challenged, barely able to sing and equipped with a truly boring song, there is no possible objective explanation for her victory.
Ms Serifovic, who is now apparently about to embark on a tour of six European nations - hopefully not including Britain - won with 268 points because she benefited from the Balkan Block Vote.
She was awarded a maximum 12 points by Croatia, Bosnia And Herzegovina and Macedonia. Surely it was no coincidence that all these nations - and Serbia - were, until recently part of the old Communist Yugoslavia.
Voting in the Eurovision is no longer the preserve of a privileged elite of judges, but of the great European public. And the public back their neighbours, casting their votes for narrow regional affinities, in the knowledge that their neighbours will return the favour by voting for them.
The truth is that there is no wider European cultural identity, merely a series of localised voting blocks. This is not a oneoff phenomenon, nor is it confined to the wooded hills of the Balkans. It's endemic throughout Eurovision and across Europe.
You don't have to take my word for this. There have - and this is not a joke - been a series of heavyweight academic studies of Eurovision bias.
I was particularly taken by the work of Derek Gatherer, sometime lecturer in molecular genetics, who last year published a study of these "collusive voting alliances".
Mr Gatherer took time out of his statistical analysis to assure readers that the Eurovision is not "an outdated farrago of dubious taste born in an era of naive enthusiasm for European unity", but is "an important cultural phenomenon meriting academic study". So he's not wasting his time, then.
He identifies the crucial regional alliances; the all-powerful Balkan Bloc (former Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece etc), the Viking Empire (Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Norway), and the Warsaw Pact (Russia, Poland, the Ukraine). Since the turn of the millennium, nearly all Eurovision victories can be traced back to these alliances.
Sorry Scooch, but you never stood a chance. And nor for that matter did the much better German entry, the critical success of the contest, Roger Cicero singing "It's women who rule the world". He came 19th, four places in front of Britain.
Britain's entry - Scooch - finished 2nd-bottom, above Ireland and level on points with France. That's not only because the song wasn't very good, but because the UK isn't part of a Eurovision bloc, with many neighbouring countries voting for us
This sad state of affairs - and yes, I do think it's sad that we haven't won since Katrina And The Waves with Love Shine A Light two days after Tony Blair entered Downing Street in 1997 - is in many ways a parallel of the situation in the EU.
The two organisations were founded at roughly the same time, for similar reasons. The European Coal And Steel Community began in 1951. Eurovision - set up like the EEC by dreamers who believed in a united cultural and political Europe - grew from modest beginnings in 1955.
And as with the EEC, Britain joined Eurovision a little later than everyone else.
Eurovision - like the EU - was supposed to see the gradual disappearance of narrowly nationalist European cultural barriers and the growth of a pan-European culture. It hasn't happened. In fact, Europe seems to be becoming more nationalist.
And this is also, unfortunately, true of Brussels. The EU may have grown massively in power and influence, but within its creaking bureaucratic embrace, every nation manoeuvres ruthlessly for national and regional advantage.
So we have a ridiculous European Parliament with two Parliamentary Chambers, one in Strasbourg and the other in Brussels.
We have the French illegally banning British beef for many years and Brussels unable and unwilling to do anything about it.
We have Germany using every trick in the book to prevent foreigners - other Europeans, or anyone else - buying into its industrial and commercial base.
We have Italy and Spain, determined to protect their textile industries, manipulating Brussels with the result that British consumers pay more for clothes and shoes.
We have every country fighting its corner, every European Commissioner fighting for their country, and the European ideal no more than a tattered fig leaf to cover this giant bureaucratic gravy train.
The other respect in which Eurovision and the EU are similar is that the larger countries pay the bills, but the smaller countries increasingly call the shots, because there are more of them. So both Eurovision and the EU are funded by the Big Four - Britain, Germany, Spain and France.
Meanwhile, the smaller nations are happy to spend our money in their countries, to send their citizens to our country to do the jobs that lazy Britons don't want, and, incidentally, to benefit from our overwhelmingly more generous welfare state, education system, and health care. But we can't complain - we're all citizens of Europe now.
There is no obvious solution to the Eurovision mess, but it doesn't really matter. After all, it is only a song contest and only once a year that we have the opportunity to listen to a band of Ukrainians - whose outfits suggested escapees from an audition for role of the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz - intoning: "To dance or not to dance . . . it's not a question."
But the EU is much more significant. More than half our laws are made in Brussels and, as a parting shot, Tony Blair wants to sign us up to a European Constitution which will make matters much worse.
So please Mr Blair, stop pushing reality out of sight, and accept the Eurovision message - that there is no point in trying to create a political EU while the people of Europe cling so fiercely to their national and regional identities.
dailymail.co.uk
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