A strange ritual staged each year by member countries of the European Broadcasting
Union, this is basically a huge TV show, staged by the country which won it the year
before, where over 20 European countries (plus Israel, as they're in the EBU) perform
a song. This sounds simple, but it's far from it.

Having started in the late 50s, the Contest has built up a reputation for terrible music,
bad taste, and obvious partisan and political bias in the individual countries' votes which
decide the winner. People still love watching it, though, and it draws audiences in the
hundreds of millions, largely as it's cheaper (to watch, that is - staging the thing costs
the unfortunate broadcaster who won the year before around 6 million Euros) than
hallucinogenic substances.

From 1975 to 1998, the rules required contestants to sing in an official language of their
country, after a little-known Swedish band named "Abba" won in 1974 with a song, sung in
English, called "Waterloo". This caused much hilarity among those trying to figure out
what, for instance, the Dutch entry was actually about (except among the Dutch,
obviously) until the advent of Teletext subtitling of the English translation. This
caused even more hilarity when people could actually work out what the songs were
about. This rule was relaxed for the 1999 contest, and half the countries promptly
reverted to singing in English again.

The winner of the contest, i.e. the best bad song, is decided by votes from each country. In the past, each
country taking part would have a jury, composed of all the great and the good in their
musical community, who would award points to the songs from one point to eight
points, then ten and twelve. In modern times, though, telephone voting by the public
has largely taken over, and these are tallied to produce the points awarded from each
country. What has not changed, however, is the panache and suspense as each country's
representative calls in their points at the end, with the compulsory repetition by the
show's host for clarity, in English and French. ("Les Pays-Bas, deux points. The Netherlands,
two points.")

In the past, again, these were called in over crackling, hissing, telephone lines that tended
to fail excitingly at the crucial moment, but with
the march of technology it's no fun any more as they are called in over full-bandwidth
digital vision circuits with PCM stereo sound. Colin Berry, a Radio 2 continuity
announcer, has been calling in the results from the UK in his perfectly modulated BBC
English ever since time began.

In summary, there are far too many strange and surreal things about this contest for
it to be missed when it comes round every May. Oh, one final point - 99% of the people
you ask about it will profess to hate it, but they all love it really. Don't believe them.

(See also - Wogan, Terry)