No Rock And Roll Fun

EUROVISION PROPOSAL: So, once again, the ritual of Cyprus giving Greece 12, Greece gives Cyprus 12 has been gone through, but as with the expansion of the EU, the centre of Eurovision gravity has shifted quite a way East as the Balkans and Baltics and Slavs share their cake amongst themselves. Of course, it doesn't really matter, and we're quite taken with idea of one night's programming a year coming live from the old Warsaw Pact ourselves. Certainly, the accension countries seem to put a bit more effort into it - maybe we'd have stood a better chance if James Fox had been dressed in a posing pouch with two girls in cages waving their stripper's tassles at the camera. Not as good a chance we've had stood if James Fox had been Clare Grogan, but a better chance nevertheless.

Anyway, it's clear that - just to stop the annual moaning about the votes being given out with one eye on the political realities of the modern Europe - something needs to be done. The problem of buddy-voting could be reduced if every voting country had to provide a score for every song. While Denmark and Iceland would still swap their highest accolades, having to provide some sort of scores for everyone would at least smooth out the effect of, say, all of the Yugoslav countries voting themselves big. The downside is sitting through a bilingual announcement of twenty-five scores from thirty-odd nations would prolong the voting to a point where even the keenest Eurovision fan might start flicking over to see what was on the other side (by this point, it'd be ITV Nightscreen).

So, we have a modest proposal. Keep the ten points to be shared out amongst the ten favourite songs per jury, but let's alter the jury system a little. At the moment, each nation has its own jury. What we'd like to see is juries comprised of more than one country. They could be regional, although that would have problems (Would the UK pair with Ireland? Does France go with Andorra, or should Spain do that?), so it would make sense for the partners to be chosen at random - I see something like the World Cup final draws, with a giant brandy glass containing all the names of the voting nations, drawn out two by two. Each country would still have a phone vote on the evening, but the totals for the pair nations would be combined before the points were distributed - so you might find that the UK and Russia had their votes added together. In order to stop the sheer volume of large countries swamping smaller pair partners, before the votes are combined they'd be altered to one point per percentage of the poll. Of course, this means that only half the EBU nations would get to have a presenter sat in front of a picture of their downtown capital (although they could get the pairs to co-anchor: "Now, the votes from the United Kingdom and Malta, with Lorraine Kelly from the BBC in Valetta..."), but on the upside it'd save them some cash. It wouldn't stop the good people of Spain casting votes in favour of their Portugese brothers, but it would reduce the distortion in the voting.

Now, onto item two: calls for the immedeate reinstatement of Colin Berry.