well eurovision can be taken seriously cos it reveals some interesting things about europeans and who we want to be. it's especially good because it's not controlled by the elites but the middle class - hard to get any information on those chappies!!
ireland is interesting cos we went through loads of different approaches to it to match our development. in the 1990s winning mattered to us and we sent genuinely talented songsters to win and felt very european when we did
then when we got rich and stopped caring about what the world thought of us we decided to make money out of it and let 13 year olds choose the songer because they were willing to pay for it - now it seems that a combination of the qualifying system and our own maturity means we send a proper singer (or at least a close approximation of!!) and are happy with tenth place
Eurovision is great because it says so much about a country and its hopes - look at what winning means to israel, turkey and ukraine - it lets them be europeans, if only for an evening...
i'm sure someone who knows about finland will say that the song was a reaction to the conservative nature of society there or something like that
the voting patterns are even more fascinating - people complain about "balkan blocs" etc but the fact that young serbs and croats are willing to vote for each other despite the fact that their elites don't even speak to each other is amazing.
then there is the immigrant populations - germany gives 12 to turkey and israel gives 12 to russia - dunno what we gave to poland but watch it rise as years go by
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interestingly the americans are going to run a similar one for the states to compete in. the states in the US are notoriously self conscious or self absorbed (new york) or a combination thereof -
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