Product Description

Fifty years after Jetty Paerl took to the Lugano stage and burst into 'The Birds of Holland', the Eurovision Song Contest is still luring 450 million of us to the sofa on that special Saturday night in May. But where once we settled down to admire the 'top-quality original songwriting' that the contest was inaugurated to showcase, throughout the long post-ABBA decades Eurovision has come to entertain us for all the wrong reasons: we chortle at its magnificent foolishness, its stubborn reinforcement of the crudest national stereotypes, at a scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship and hatred. And as post-modern connoisseurs of showbiz meltdown, our focus has shifted from the blandly competent winners to the spangled, hapless, table-propping losers, those left to wander the lonely, windswept summit of Mount Fiasco. The gold standard of farcical failure, the benchmark of badness, to score nul points is to suffer international ignominy and find sympathetic understanding replaced by brutal guffaws. Remorseful of his own longstanding contributions to the latter chorus, yet darkly fascinated with those lives shadowed by the entertainment world's most grandiose humiliation, Tim Moore sets off to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who have come and gone without troubling the scorers since Norway's Jahn Teigen twanged his silver braces and leapt splay-legged off the Palais des Congres stage in 1978. From Lisbon to Lithuania, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Moore travels the continent to hear their extraordinary stories - 'poignant, ludicrous and heartwarming in almost equal measure' - recounting as he does so the no less improbable history of Eurovision itself, a towering cathedral of cheese that can nonetheless claim responsibility for keeping Norway out of the EU and catalysing the overthrow of a Portuguese dictatorship.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118039 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

GCN Magazine
"A must for all fans of the competition...a hilarious and
fascinating romp"

The Times
'A barmy but brilliant idea, Moore's execution is pitch-perfect...
side-splittingly funny'

Irish Times
engaging and even informative

Customer Reviews

Highly original
Tim Moore was inspired to write this book through his friendship with Jane Alexander and her experience of coming 3rd in the UK national final to choose a song for the Eurovision Song Contest in 1989. He began to wonder what had become of the singers who came last in the Eurovision Song Contest, and this led him to look at the names of those who have suffered what he dubs »light entertainment's ultimate indignity«- a zero score in the Eurovision Song Contest.

The contest has given the English language the term »Nul Points«, despite the fact that, as Mr Moore rightly points out, the phrase has never been uttered on the Eurovision stage. He decided to limit his definition of »Nul-Pointers« to those who have failed to score under the current 12 points voting system (previous voting systems made it much easier to come away empty handed). This left him with a list of 14 acts to visit in their own counties, in chronological order, beginning with Norway 's Jahn Teigen and ending with the UK 's Jemini.

What had begun as a project based on the UK 's Woganesque derision of the ESC, fuelled by schadenfreude, quickly took on a life of its own as Tim Moore delved deeper into the lives and times of Eurovision and its »pointless« contestants. The book is meticulously researched and the author generously credits the Eurovision fan base as his best and most reliable source of material. From the 14 candidates, he finally visited 9. A meeting with Remediou Amaya [Spain 1983] could not be arranged and Çetin Alp had sadly passed away, drawing the final curtain on his 1983 debacle for Turkey (the book is dedicated to his memory). Wilfred ( Austria 1988), Thomas Förster ( Austria 1991) and Gunvor ( Switzerland 1998) all declined to talk about their Eurovision experiences. Nevertheless, all these artists get a sympathetic hearing in the book.

Of the close encounters of the Eurovision kind which do take place, the reports range from the amusing (Teigen and Sigyal Taner) to the distressing (Finn Kalvik and Celia Lawson). The book is packed full of trivia and pointed observations, making it a joy to read. Tim Moore's style owes something to that of fellow travel writer Bill Bryson, another author who combines facts with fun. The final chapter is dedicated to his visit to see the ESC live in Kyiv in 2005. Only here does he drop a factual clanger, wrongly crediting Gracia's ill-fated German entry to the pen of Ralf Siegel (a forgivable error). He was much relieved when the contest produced no additional »Nul Pointers«, even if 2005 was a year of near-misses.

One of the most amusing and original books even written on subject, this book is highly recommended to Eurovision fans and Eurovision foes alike.

Ivor Lyttle

La Royaume Uni, douze points!!
I can't say I'd usually have been attracted to a book about the Eurovision Song Contest, let alone the worst of it, but as a bit of a Tim Moore diehard I thought I'd give this a go. I'm certainly glad I did - along with the usual belly laughs (Terry Wogan eat your heart out) I found myself almost welling up with tears at some of the 13 amazing stories he travels the world to hear first hand. All human life is here: tragedy, farce, compassion, resentment, the lot. I finished it in three days and when I lent it to my sister she did it in two (breaking her previous record by about a month!).

From Heroes To Zeros
Following on from his exploits around the Tour de France route, the "real" Monopoly board of London and a trek with a stubborn donkey along the route of the Santiago de Compostela, it wasn't only a matter of time before Tim Moore's attention, and writing, was drawn to the wonderful spectacle that is the Eurovision Song Contest.

Rather than cover the contest as a whole Tim decided to delve deeper into the betes-noire of the contest, those much-maligned artists whose joy at national victory was brought suddenly and very publicly back down to earth with a bump when they scored nul points.

As any Eurovision statto will tell you there have been 34 entrants who have failed to trouble the scorers, although some can reasonably claim that the scoring system didn't help. Between 1971 and 1973 it wasn't possible to score nothing as every song, however bad, received some points and in the early to mid sixties there were so few points on offer than the non-scorers were always in good (or bad) company.

The eminently-readable "Nul Points" follows Tim Moore's attempts to interview the last 14 non-scorers from Jahn Teigen in 1974 to our very own Jemini in 2003. Out of patriotic loyalty, I actually decided to read the Jemini chapter first and then the rest of the book. Notwithstanding the rights and wrongs of what may or may not have happened on that fateful night in the Riga's Skonto Olympic Arena, one thing that strikes me from reading the book is that Jemini seemed totally unprepared for the international arena they were about to enter. Akin to giving a Christian a plastic knife to take on the lions, there seems to have been very little in the way of a support mechanism for them in their Euro-adventure. Who should take the blame for that is now ancient history but it left me feeling more a little sorry for them as they returned to the real life of day jobs and bills to pay.

Tim Moore fails to fall into the trap of so many Fleet Street (are there actually any left there?) hacks around competition time by avoiding all the stereotypes and lazy journalism fans of the contest have come to expect. Sure, you can't not mention the political voting, the outfits, the repetitive lyrics but Tim doesn't dwell on those as he seeks to find out what has become of the unfortunate fourteen nul pointers.

Some of the infamous fourteen have survived better than others. Some like Jahn Tiegen have become Eurovision legends (his failure didn't stop two further attempts at the contest) and others, well, you'll need to read the book to find out. It's obvious that the author is a fan of the contest but he fails to let that get in the way as another book in his excellent series of travelogues only underlines what a fine, comic writer he is. For Nul Points, I award Douze Points.