Good piece by Mark Lawson in The Guardian today about the ghastly Eurovision song contest, which I trust you enjoyed as much as I did. These were, by some margin, the worst songs I have heard in a contest which is renowned for its awful songs. Ours was worse than most, and delivered badly by the singer.
Of course some of the voting is political and of course everybody hates us, but that’s not a reason to pull out. The reason to pull out is, as ever, the French.
The contest is compered in English, because English is a second language in almost all and a third language in the rest of Europe. Why, then, should there be a simultaneous translation into a language spoken by a vanishingly small percentage of the TV audience, i.e. French? If there’s going to another language on display it should be German, or Russian, or Spanish. And why should the French persist in announcing their results in their fatuous language?
All of this is, in itself, a small issue. But France’s vaulting, deluded, arrogance is one reason why I was never terribly keen on the EU.
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