My ‘give it to England’ Eurovision plan
From Sir Terry’s witty take on the Eurovision glam and political posturing to the amazingly brilliant OTT campness – I love Eurovision and watch it with my family every year.
And this year will be no different. On Saturday, despite there being a major cricket tournament happening in Jersey that I’m reporting on – I will get home early and sit down with my wife and daughter to watch the greatest show of camp on planet Earth.
What’s been impressive about this years show is the new media element. In video form we’ve had hundreds of clips from the Eurovision official site – a mix of behind the scenes stuff, the full songs of every entry and all the filler clips they make for the British, BBC, no advertising audience.
On the BBC site we’ve had much the same – but with a side order of Terry Wogan, Paddy O’Connel and a Eurovision Party Planner.
There’s even an official Eurovision You Tube channel that injects that much needed social media element. And in keeping with social media sites – the BBC have a Eurovision Party Flickr Group as well.
Back to the official site and, in addition to the videos we have photos, blogs, audio downloads and even a Eurovision fan profile system.
Which is all wonderful – but the UK is still going to end up with hardly any points for various political and social reasons out of our control.
The problem is that we let people vote. Most of the money for the Eurovision contest comes from just four of the participating nations – the ones that actually fund it.
In the last ten years the Eurovision song contest has been won by Isreal, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, Ukraine, Greece, Finland and Serbia.
In the last twenty years it’s only been won once by one of the big four funding countries and that was the UK in 1997 and only around 12 times by the big four in the history of the competition.
Which leaves the big question as “why” what is the reason behind the big four ‘providers’ getting so few votes from the competition minnows?
In the last decade or so the mass of new Eastern block countries have all voted for each other – which has meant a heavily reduced chance of the Western nations getting a win.
So my response is that I think the smaller EU countries are being extremely rude. Here we are (UK, Spain, Germany and France) giving massive amounts of money so they can particpate in this show that they clearly enjoy more than we do – and they don’t vote for us!
I mean it could be the songs – but they’re not THAT bad.
UK
We need a solution to the Eastern Block countries voting for each other – they’re not going to stop doing it and we can’t stop them entering – so something else is needed.
A pact between the Western countries won’t work either – there are too many ancient rivalries and issues for that to happen. So lets leave the other three out of this and concentrate on the UK alone.
First we need to split the UK up into separate jurisdictions that can enter Eurovision independently.
We can probably already get away with entering England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark.
If we could guarantee a vote from each of those places for the England entry one year, the Scotland entry the next and so on then we might just win.
There is a snag here – the various parts of the UK and or British Isles don’t particularly like each other very much. Where Scotland might vote for Wales and Wales might vote for the Isle of Man Scotland won’t vote for England.
Where Jersey might vote for England, Scotland or Wales Jersey will never vote for Guernsey or possibly even the Isle of Man – so we need to drop the idea of voting.
For this idea to work we need to go back to panels. As the BBC is the state broadcaster in each of those separate jurisdictions it would be the host broadcaster and so, in turn would be able to apoint the panel for each – we just need to make sure that the panel is all originally from the country we want to win that year.
So if it’s England’s year the panel in each of the other jurisdictions would have to be from England.
That solved we need to count the points. Last year Serbia won with 268 points. Under the current system we managed to scrape 19 points at the last Eurovision – so to win we need to make up an additional 249 points from somewhere (not allowing for the extra votes that would be generated from each of our new ‘countries’ second, third, fourth etc… votes – I want to keep the explanation simple).
Can we get 249 points from the eight new jurisdictions we’ve created (eight because you can’t vote for yourself)? Well clearly not as 8×12 is only 96 – if we add the 19 we got last year that only gives us 115 points – that would have put us in tenth place last year.
Clearly that’s better than 19 but not nearly enough to win on – my assumption is that we would actually need over 300 points to win with this new system.
So we need to more than double what we’ve got – we need an additional 200 points to be sure of victory – that’s an additional 17 new entrants into the competition – ouch.
Obviously the more entrants we put forward the more votes we would need to win – but lets ignore that for now and stick to the 320 point figure.
OK so we can take most of the Islands that make up the British Isles – those in addition to the Channel Islands and Isle of Man I’ve already mentioned. We’ve got Orkney, Shetland, Isle of Skye, Isle of White, The Scilly Isles, Ynys Mon, Lindisfarne, Lundy, Caldey, Lewis, Harris, Cumbrae, Lismore and Scalpay.
That gives us an extra 14 and leaves us just three shy of the extra 17 we need – we’re going to have to be a bit more creative here – it’s time to release the cities oh and Cornwall.
Lets give Cornwall the independence many of its residence seem to crave to bring us up to 15 – make London a free state to give us 16 and finish it off with freedom for the people of Milton Keynes – who wants Milton Keynes anyway.
Clever strategy. We’ve seen the same clumping in the US, only more along community rather than state lines. It’s been breaking up a bit recently, though that may be due to the lessening of general interest in the competition.