How Terry Wogan sees Europe

So, yet another Eurovision Song Contest, and get another round of chest-beating and sour grapes from people who think that the reason the UK came last was because of a Europe-wide conspiracy against us and in favour of any of those commies to the east. Every year the protests seem to get louder, and every year they annoy me even more.

Apparently it was inevitable that Russia were always going to benefit from “political” voting. So inevitable that I didn’t see anyone predicting it. Terry Wogan himself didn’t, except until Russia started racking up the points at which point it had become an obvious conspiracy.

The thing is, this is nonsense. As Chris Applegate has pointed out, this is the first time Russia has ever won the Eurovision Song Contest. So much for the inevitability of Russia’s success.

While so many wise-guys are quick to say after the event how predictable the result of the ESC was, I’ve yet to see so many people successfully predict who will win beforehand. Derek Gatherer predicts who will win, but only after the semi-finals have taken place. This is a bit like buying a lottery ticket once you know what the first five balls are. Even then, his prediction — Ukraine — was wrong (although close).

There were three specific countries that Terry Wogan said twice during the broadcast would benefit from political voting across Europe. He said this for each of the three countries during their turn, and he said it again during the recap while the phone numbers are displayed on the screen. (Check it on BBC iPlayer.)

The three countries that, according to Terry Wogan, were inevitably going to benefit from political voting? Romania, Albania and Poland. These countries finished 20th, 17th and 24th respectively — out of 25 countries in the final. If there was a conspiracy, whoever was behind it cocked it up big time.

Of course, Terry Wogan could have seen that his theory was bogus if he simply looked at the results of the semi-final (he did do that, didn’t he?). He would have seen that Poland only got through because it was chosen by the jury and did not finish among the top seven chosen by the televote. Albania also just scraped in, having come 7th in the televote.

The fact that Poland came joint-last in the final along with the UK shows just how hollow the ‘bloc votes’ theory is. It is certainly not as simple as “countries in the east are bound to benefit”. Poland’s paltry score of 14 was made up of points from just two countries — Ireland and the UK. The last time I checked, neither of these countries were in eastern Europe.

Furthermore, the past fourteen Eurovision Song Contests have been won by fourteen different countries. This is completely unprecedented in the history of the ESC (the previous longest run being eight). Incidentally, only 7 of those countries can be credibly described as “eastern European”.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that the countries that make up the British Isles have been the most successful in the ESC’s history, Ireland and the UK having won twelve contests between them, including an incredible run of five wins in six years in the mid-1990s. The UK has also finished second 15 times, more than any other country.

Far from becoming predictable, the Eurovision Song Contest is more open than it has ever been. You can put this almost entirely down to the introduction of televoting in 1998. As Chris Applegate says, it is far easier to rig Eurovision when it is just a few jury members rather than the entire population of the EBU countries that have to be manipulated.

All of this is not to say that there is not political (or cultural, or whatever) voting going on. Incidentally, the cultural-similarity argument is quite strong, though not watertight. Even correcting for linguistic and cultural similarities, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania still engage in bloc voting.

Even so, this is a very small number of countries. As Ewan Spence points out most “blocs” consist of 5 or 6 countries.

In fact, Derek Gatherer’s Venn diagram shows that “blocs” are actually as small as two countries, or four at a push. Of course, the UK and Ireland have formed their own little bloc, which is what makes little Britishers’ protests all the more pathetically hypocritical.

As such, the fact that Russia won cannot credibly be blamed on bloc voting. In order to win the ESC, any country has to appeal beyond their bloc and gain votes from across Europe. For this reason, the idea of entering different songs for England, Scotland, etc. (or even full-on independence — any excuse to bring that up, eh? ) so that the UK could engage in its own bloc voting would fail.

The ESC Today website has analysed the votes of “western” and “eastern” European countries separately. What they show is that even in the western-only table, Russia came fifth. That’s not a win, but it is only 13 points behind the western winner, Greece. Also of note in the western-only table is the fact that Germany finished bottom and the UK also did very badly. Meanwhile, in the eastern-only table, Poland finish joint bottom with nul points.

Clearly, blaming the iron curtain as Terry Wogan does (hopefully in jest) is wide of the mark. Even locking the eastern Europeans out of the voting, eastern Europeans would still pick up plenty of points.

The thing about the “bloc votes” theory is that it’s just the sort of thing that becomes true if you just say it often enough. Ignorance has a lot to do with it.

Recently I had the misfortune to catch an episode of The Paul O’Grady Show where Terry Wogan was a guest talking about the ESC. He mentioned in passing that Azerbaijan were participating for the first time — to hoots of laughter from the audience. “Azer-ban-jan?!”, yelped O’Grady. “I’ve never even heard of Azer-ban-jan! Is it even in Europe?” I hope O’Grady was joking (though there’s every chance he wasn’t), but I just know that some of the laughing audience members were thinking exactly that.

I think for a lot of people, the Eurovision Song Contest is perhaps the only time of the year they discover a Europe beyond, say, the EU-12 or the iron curtain or Mediterranean holiday resorts. In a contest of 41 countries, and with many well-known western European countries (Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg) declining to participate, the chances are high that the winning country will be one that many people couldn’t point to on a map. It might be as if “eastern Europe” is just one big country for these people.

If a country people can’t point to on a map (or those dirty commies in Russia) wins the ESC rather than a country a stone’s throw away from the UK, people jump to conclusions and start concocting the conspiracy theories. So if Russia wins, it’s political voting because eastern Europeans don’t want Russia to shut down the gas pipe. If Serbia wins, it’s the Balkan bloc voting that did it. If Finland wins, it’s the Scandinavian bloc vote. And so on.

Well here is a radical idea. Perhaps the countries that win the Eurovision Song Contest do so because they write songs that appeal to a wide variety of European countries and performed well on the night.

The real reason the UK tends to do so poorly in the ESC these days is that its entries are so mediocre. The UK seems to alternate between entering a song that is overtly camp and too knowing and / or stupid to be taken seriously (Scooch, Jemini, Daz Sampson) and insipid, bland, instantly forgettable dross (Javine, James Fox, Andy Abraham). It’s no accident that the last time the UK won the ESC back in 1997, it was with a song that was actually quite good (and incidentally holds the record for the largest winning margin in the ESC) and performed by a well known band and not some reality TV reject?

I mean, really, what can the UK expect if it enters someone like Andy Abraham? The man lost at The X Factor for crying out loud. What made anyone think he would win Eurovision?! As for the performance, it was nothing to write home about was it? Terry Wogan said he liked it, but I seem to remember he said the same about Jemini’s notoriously bad performance.

Blaming the UK’s loss on bloc voting when there are more sensible explanations just reflects badly on Wogan and all the others who bring up this red herring. It comes across as sour grapes.

I suppose the question is, does the UK really want to win Eurovision? The ESC is seen as trashy kitsch by most in the UK. This helps explain why most of the UK’s entrants these days are desperate reality television losers. Some countries may see the ESC as a joke, but others are clearly passionate to win the contest. Russia in particular tends to enter more famous artists. Their performer this year, Dima Bilan, is one of the country’s biggest pop stars who is on the verge of making a name for himself internationally.

It seems to me as though there are many countries who want to win the Eurovision Song Contest much more than the UK wants to. So why not let them win rather than throwing your hands up and shouting “conspiracy”?

As for Terry Wogan’s hints that he may quit Eurovision, I do hope he calls it a day. I can’t stand his commentary. The man is not a fraction as funny as he thinks he is. He mistakes rudeness for wit. He has been past it for as long as I can remember. If he quits, I hope Paddy O’Connell get the job. He has always done a fantastic job at commentating during the semi-final. He is witty but not cynical, and obviously still likes the ESC, unlike Wogan.

For what it’s worth, my favourite song was France’s — ‘Divine’ by Sébastien Tellier. I think France should just be given bonus points for entering a song containing non-French lyrics for a change!

5–0 at half time. And Scotland usually embarrass themselves against the Faroe Islands. This is just as well — we need all the goals we can get when, as Garry notes, we have a World Cup quarter finalist and both World Cup finallists in our group. And only two go through.

I’ve just bought a new alarm clock. Every alarm clock I’ve ever owned has broken. I did have one of those really cheap ones you get out of Argos, but one day the hands stopped moving. Eventually they also began to droop down, leaving gravity to dictate the time. It was permanently 6:30. Useless.

So then I bought a sturdy old-fashioned wind-up Westclox one. Surely that wouldn’t be problematic? Well, it actually needs a rest every now and again. If you’ve not wound it up for a few weeks, it’s fine. But if you want to use it every day (for instance, I don’t know, maybe because you have to get up every day) it is completely useless. Sooner or later it will just stop, without warning. Sometimes it just stops in the middle of the night, so the alarm will never go off. If you want to get it going again you have to nudge it, but that’s no good if it stops in the middle of the night.

I’ve found myself actually having to get up early fairly often, what with exams and various other things, so I have now opted for a cheap-but-not-so-cheap alarm clock from Tesco. It’s not so loud, so I’m going to use it alongside the Westclox one just as a backup really.

It doesn’t help that I’ve always been terrible in the mornings. I’ve always liked staying up late, even when I was very young apparently. Even when I’m tired, there is usually at least one thing I want to squeeze in before I go to sleep, even if it’s just something like listening to Dr Karl.

Going to sleep never seems important at night time, but in the morning getting some more sleep always seems to be the most important thing. Nothing decent happens in the morning, so there’s no point in being around unless you have to be. So this isn’t the first time I’ve used more than one alarm at once. I’m sure at one point when I was at school I used five alarms at once. Of course it never worked, so I just gave that up.

Why am I writing all of this boring stuff about my sleep and non-sleep? Because I’ve just read this interesting article by Steve Pavlina about how to make yourself get up as soon as the alarm clock goes off (via inluminent). I’m sure this isn’t the first time I’ve read an article about sleep / getting up on that blog.

Anyway, one of the first questions he asks is:

Do you find yourself hitting the snooze button and going right back to sleep?

Yes I do! I blame Blue Peter for that. Seriously. I never used to see the point of the snooze button. I thought, “if you’ve set the alarm clock you want to get up. If you switch it off then you want more sleep — you wouldn’t want to be woken up again only five minutes later.” I think that’s true actually, but the advice on Blue Peter said that the snooze button is actually a good thing! It can help ease you into the day and give you a bit of thinking time — some preparation for the events of the day ahead. Maybe there’s something in that, but usually I properly fall back alseep when I use the snooze button so I don’t think I really get much thinking time in…

You decide to get up at a certain time in advance, but then you undo that decision when the alarm goes off. At 10pm you decide it would be a good idea to get up at 5am. But at 5am you decide it would be a better idea to get up at 8am. But let’s face it — you know the 10pm decision is the one you really want implemented… if only you could get your 5am self to go along with it.

That’s familiar! I did it yesterday actually. I was meant to get up early yesterday to go in and get some essay feedback from my tutor. At least, that was the plan the night before. But as soon as my alarm went off, the excuses racked up.

• My tutor hasn’t properly marked my essay anyway because he’s on strike, so I’ll only get vague feedback and a rough estimate of my mark
• If the dispute isn’t sorted out in time my mark for the essay won’t count anyway
• My train will be late anyway
• Even so, I can just catch a later train — I’m sure my tutor will still be around 30 minutes later

The excuse about my train being late is always the most dangerous one. The trains actually often arrive at Kirkcaldy early these days, and Sod’s Law dictates that they certainly won’t be late if I’ve slept in. And of course my tutor wasn’t still there thirty minutes later. It’s just as well I needed to brush up on my maths in the library so it wasn’t a wasted trip.

You don’t need two or three alarm clocks scattered around the room.

Correct. If you’re inclined to fall back asleep again you are going to switch all of the alarms off. It’s not actually much more difficult than switching one alarm off. Having alarms at the other side of the room isn’t much help either, for me at least. I just got up, switched it off, and crawled back into bed again. It was like a routine; autopilot. I don’t bother with all of that any more.

The trouble with routines like this is that it’s always easy to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll have a day off, because it’s a Sunday / Friday / Wednesday / you get the picture.” It’s also difficult to have a set pattern because my day-to-day life doesn’t follow a set patter. For instance, I couldn’t get up at the same time every day because I would end up getting up at 7am on a Sunday morning. Why would anybody want to do that?

I might give Steve Pavlina’s suggestions a try. It’s more flexible because you can still set the alarm whenever you want and award yourself the odd sleep in. But it sounds like an awful lot of effort. Practice? Pah!

I went through to Glasgow with my parents today, which is why I’m a bit too tired to blog properly.

We went to see Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s House for an Art Lover. For those who don’t know (like me before I was dragged along), it was an entry into a sort of ‘dream house’ kind of competition in a German magazine, at the very start of the twentieth century. Mackintosh’s fantastic design was disqualified because he submitted some of his drawings too late. Doh.

In the 1980s somebody, seemingly randomly, decided he was going to build Mackintosh’s dream. And there it is, positioned in Bellahouston Park, a little piece of beauty amidst all the hustle and bustle of the city (Ibrox Stadium is just a stone’s throw away). There was one part in the audio guide when you stand on a balcony outside the music room which said something along the lines of, “Imagine sitting in the night air with the doors open listening to the music.” I couldn’t quite manage to imagine that because of the traffic noise.

I was particularly struck by the music room. Most of the rooms are dark brown or silvery — the music room is white all over, and it really hits you. It’s quite ornate and certainly very beautiful. The piano is just stunning. Mackintosh was clearly an imaginative guy! I was very impressed.

It only cost £3.50 to get in aswell. Bargain! I got some nice photos out of it aswell.

(One person was overheard leaving the House for an Art Lover saying, “…but I got the impression that not all of the furniture was original.” Doh — none of it’s original!)

Ever found it difficult to find good Scottish political blogs? I know I did at first. But gradually I found that they were there to be discovered. It’s just that you need to dig pretty deep to find it.

Well a new blog aims to change that. Scottish Political Blogs Review has been on the go for a wee while, ever since Stuart Dickson started it. Now he’s got Garry Smith on board and today the first SPBR Weekly Roundup (yes, an idea stolen from based upon Tim Worstall’s own Britblog Roundup) has been posted.

It even mentions one of my posts!

This is one to keep an eye on. It will hopefully help us all find the best blogging about Scottish politics.

(Incidentally, Stuart and Garry, if you’re still looking for volunteers I’d be happy to help. I don’t know what I could do, but I’m offering anyway.)