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Eurovision Song Contest

From Wikiquote, the free quote compendium

The Eurovision Song Contest is a annual song competition held among the member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) since 1956.

Quotes

  • It’s hard for me to overstate how little I care about Eurovision (or much of anything beginning with the prefix “Euro” or ending with the suffix “vision”). The music is groundbreakingly bad, the performances are desperately campy, and the attending crowds chant for Jewish blood. All of which is to say, the contest is, in the end, a pretty accurate representation of Europe’s vision.
  • Perhaps the most widely celebrated object of ridicule was the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual television competition first broadcast in 1970. A commercial exercise glossed as a celebration of the new technology of simultaneous television transmission to multiple countries, the show claimed hundreds of millions of spectators by the mid-70s. The Eurovision Song Contest, in which B-League crooners and unknowns from across the continent performed generic and forgettable material, before returning in almost every case to the obscurity whence they had briefly emerged, was so stunningly banal in conception and execution as to defy parody. It would have been out of date fifteen years earlier, but for just that reason, it heralded something new. The enthusiasm with which the Eurovision Song Contest promoted and celebrated a hopelessly dated format and a stream of inept performers reflected a growing culture of nostalgia, at once wistful and disabused. If punk, postmodern and parody were one response to the confusions of a disillusioned decade, retro was another.
    • Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
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