Douze Points

Yep its been that time of year again and once more I feel the need for some euro-cheese in the form of the Eurovision Song Contest. If you missed all the news over the weekend, don’t worry the UK came last again.

The contests of old in my childhood have formed a bond with learning my countries in French .. Malte, Pay-Bas (which I notice they have on their airmail letters, I got one on Sat), Cyprus. But these days with all the former eastern block the countries of the original contest have no chance which is a shame.

There were some favourites … I had a bit of a soft spot of the Latvian pirate song, the Greek entry (which came 2nd) was pretty good too… Ukraine & other eastern bloc (the country escaped me on Sat as well) were also in the running for me. But no, on the eastern bloc voting scam it was time for Russia to host it.

The voting has just got plain silly and its time for an overhaul… why should San Marino (pop. 30,000) have the same weighing as say Germany (pop 90,000,000). I’m def liking Dr T’s thinking for how to reform the voting on Eurovision when all the bits of the former Yugoslavia go and vote for each other, the various bits of the former soviet Balkans got and vote for each other now some of them have split up a bit..

So what’s Dr T’s voting plan? It a proportional scoring based on the country’s population. So San Marino by have far less than other countries doesn’t have the percentage of the total vote that say the UK would have… and that would mean that the former Yugoslavia , Balkans & Baltics would have less dominance and their whole block voting shouldn’t have the effect it did on Saturday.

It’s unlikely alas that any major changes will happen until the main western European countries pull out (i.e. UK, France, Spain & Germany) and leave those causing the voting issues to stump up the money to run the competition that something will get done. Bravo to Austria I say, who this year said we aren’t competing as there is no chance of us winning and the voting is fix with the eastern bloc

…mind you you’ll probably still find me watching it next year, assuming El Tel is still commentating…