Last Saturday the BBC broadcast the finals of the Eurovision song contest. For those of you not familiar with this phenomenon, Eurovision is a pop song contest amongst European countries (with some random entrants like Israel, Armenia, Azerbaijan -- are the honorary Europeans?). Each country selects an artist and song to represent at the competition and then the winner is selected by votes cast by telephone. The thing is that people cannot vote for the contestant from their own country. So, what happens is that people vote for countries that they like, or for countries from which a number of people in the country come from (ie, German usually casts a large number of votes for Turkey). Nothing like a little geopolitics to go with your fluffy pop music. Russia won and all the neighboring countries voted for the Russian song.
What is so fantastic about this contest is the crazy variety of cheesy pop songs coupled with the snarky commentary from the BBC presenter. Some of the songs are awful, and some songs are done tongue in cheek. Spain's entry was one of the tongue in cheek variety.
Azerbaijan took themselves a little too seriously (this is so awful):
Latvia gave us a little Pirate Pop! Soooo cheesy:
Here's the BBC presenter for Eurovision:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/index_aa.shtml
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