Eurovision 2012 - 22/24/26 May 2012

No being realistic and up-to-date. It's a three minute support to the act, I see no reason why up and coming under thirties who have recently performed or are still performers can't be up to that limited task.

Yes, but to what end?

There's nothing wrong with putting effort and expertise into your support acts.

I would draw the honourable member's attention to this support act from the Oscars - seen only in the auditorium while the television viewers watched a commercial break.

http://www.twitvid.com/embed.php?guid=L558O&autoplay=0

Not really - it was an awful performance of an awful song and ever since the BBC threw their toys out of their pram and the juries were bought in the UK has generally suffered as a result. I see no reason at all to continue with the split voting as with the exception of last year I think the televote has provided the same winner anyway - and it's the winner that ultimately matters.

Quite. Euro-pop isn't that... err... popular... err... in... err... Europe.

Euphoria isn't really 'Euro-pop'. Be interesting if the UK found an act like Gravitonas or similar - they could do quite well. (Lucky Star is a cracking tune)

Indeed - it's amazing what you can find perusing the internet, and what you can learn from them.

Found some clips with extra audio tracks. (Tracks 1&2 were stereo programme sound, Track 3 was voting co-ordination audio, Track 4 was presenter mics only, and tracks 5&6 were Dolby E 5.1 I suspect)

During the voting each broadcaster comes up in their allocated satellite window and spot, listens to Track 3 audio and waits to be spoken to, and have their framing and audio checked, and are then instructed to switch to listen to Track 4 (the presenter mics clean). No need to derive multiple clean feeds (the spokespeople only hear the presenters - not other contributors), no need to send individual reverse audios to each country (because everyone can listen to the same presenter microphone feed without danger of hearing themselves back with a couple of seconds delay).

Very neat - if you are downlinking the contest, you get all the comms you need as well!

Clips on YouTube? Could you link to them? Sounds very interesting.

Not on YouTube. If you look for them you will find them.

I've looked but I don't really know what to search.

It is the current trend in Euro-pop.

I've now compiled league tables of each country's performance in the history of the Eurovision Song Contest. They are all available here on my blog. There are actually three tables.

Table 1: each country has been awarded 12 points for each time it's won, 10 points for each time it has finished 2nd, 8 points for each 3rd place, down to 1 point for each time it's come 10th.

Table 2: as above but the totals have been divided by the number of times the country has appeared in the grand final (N.B. Grand final means the single show that happened 1956 to 2003, and the grand final from 2004 onwards). This excludes years from 2004 to present in which a country entered a semi-final but failed to reach the grand final.

Table 3: as above but the totals have been divided by the number of times the country has entered, including years since 2004 when a country failed to qualify from the semi-final it participated in.

Interestingly despite the UK's run of bad results most years since 1999, it is still highly placed in all three tables; top of table 1, 4th in table 2 and 3rd in table 3.

If by 'Euro-pop' you mean pop music popular in Europe - then of course.

However 'Euro-pop' in Britain can also be taken to mean a specific genre of music (high-energy, synth based - think Scooch, Steps - and in Eurovision terms - Kate Ryan, Xandee etc.) This is often identified by Brits as sounding quite 'Eurovision' - even though in the last 10+years it actually hasn't done that well in the contest at all...

Well - the uplink uses MPEG2 4:2:2 ...