What I don't like about Eurovision

I don't like the days after the shows: Today, Friday, Sunday. When your country gets through, everything’s fine and all was fair. When it doesn’t… Oh dear. Everyone has an opinion, even when they haven’t watched the show, and everyone is so quick to place the blame: political voting here, eastbloc there, withdrawal! Withdrawal!... I really hate it.

Yes, there is biased voting. To call it “political” would not be the right term.
But yes, emigrants vote for their country of origin, neighbours vote for each other -because it's what they know- and yeah, horrible songs or bad singing will get through to the final or the top ten based on that. And that's frustrating. I don’t like it either, but still it's only natural. If I were to move to … I don’t know, Serbia, I’d vote for Belgium in Eurovision. Of course I would.

I still feel that a very good song will make it, no matter what. I honestly believe that. But it's also true that countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, the big four, … have to send songs that are a lot better than most other countries to make it through, because there are hardly any neighbours, emigrants or whatever to back them. And I get the frustration in that.
Let’s talk about Andy Abraham for a second. It’s not a bad song, it' s perfectly decent. However, it's destined for the bottom four. It just doesn’t stand out. But if Armenia were to send Andy Abraham, they'd make the top ten easily. What can we do about it? Nothing much I think.

Should this kind of stuff ruin the fun of Eurovision? I hope not. I think we should start caring less about our place in the ranking (a bad Armenian song will finish tenth, a bad Belgian song will finish last. A decent Turkish song will finish fifth, a decent Belgian song will finish fifteenth. The sooner we accept that and learn not to care, the better) and just concentrate on sending a nice song. If it appeals to all of Europe, it’ll win no matter what. If it doesn’t… well, depending on where you’re from you’ll either finish last or finish in the low parts of the first half of the scoreboard. Who cares. It’s just a silly –fantastic, fabulous, amazing- song contest, after all.