Euro-revision

It won't shut Terry Wogan up, of course, but the organisers of Eurovision are attempting to shuffle the rules to prevent the dominance of the Eastern nations becoming a perpetuating theme of the event.

The automatic entry into the next year's final which has previously been handed to the ten best-placed competitors is now only going to be gifted to the winner; in future, everyone beside the reigning champions will have to compete in one of two semi-finals.

Well, we say "everyone" - obviously, Britain, Germany, France and Spain will be automatically let into the finals because they fund the contest. And, certainly, Britain would never stand a chance of getting into the finals if they weren't given a bye; making them compete in a qualifier would be like throwing a kitten into a chipping machine.

There's also going to be a place in the finals which will be in the gift of the judges under a rule which we're assuming is designed to make it worth Israel continuing to turn up.

We're not quite sure that this is going to help - the organisers seem to suggest that breaking up the Balkan and former Soviet states in two semi-finals might result in a more mixed line-up in the finals, but surely it just means the block vote will operate in the same way in two semis instead of one?

And, since nobody cares about the semis anyway, is this really going to stop any block voting in the final? If the two semi-final system means there are fewer Eastern nations in the big contest, doesn't that just mean that any block vote would be more tightly targeted? And, of course, all this assumes that there is block voting taking place, and not the more likely possibility that nations which share a border might share a taste for the same sort of music.

Still, with the finals now featuring [winner of the last final] + [four rich nations] + [nine winners from semi-final A] + [nine winners from semi-final B] + [random team picked up judges], you've got to admire the Eurovision's attempts to create the most complicated system possible.