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: #198667 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Sunday Telegraph, 19 October, 2006
'He can't help writing amusingly: it's in his DNA... a sometimes
blisteringly funny account of surprisingly sad lives'

Daily Mail
"Moore's pseudo-forensic take on the whole madness...makes it so
much fun"

Irish Times
engaging and even informative

Customer Reviews

A new side to Moore
As a long-standing fan of Tim Moore with a all-time loathing for the European Song Contest (ESC), I approached this book with trepidation. I needn't have done.
After a slow but necessary start (for those of us ESC neophytes) describing its history, Moore gets into his stride when he starts to visit and interview those luckless, and sometimes hapless performers who have have had the misfortune to score 'nul points' since 1978.
The range and depth of both the research and interviews are extraordinary, given the subject matter and the sympathetic ear he brings to all seems to be rewarded, with the single exception of a Nordic narcissist.
The final chapter about his first visit to the contest itself is a return to the knock-about humour of some of his earlier books.
Compassionate and insightful. A joy.

Thumbs down from a Eurovision fan!
Well I have not read any books by this author before, but am a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest.

I was really excited by the set up of this book.What is it like to get zero points at the Eurovision Song Contest? One minute you win your national finals, then you come last.

This book has a fatal flaw, you want to hear the songs. You want to hear the song you are reading about in the book.

I wanted to know what happend AFTERWARDS to these singers. I felt there was far too much of the author telling you how hard he worked to track down the singers. He seemed to shoe-horn in "witty" jokes which just fell flat in my opinion.

Perhaps this would work better as a TV programme?

Expected more from moore
Having recently finished reading the excellent Spanish Steps by Tim Moore (possibly the funniest travel book I've ever read), I really wanted to like this too. Unfortunately it fell flat and I ended up struggling through to the end.
This is a crying shame because the premise is perfect; Moore meets with and interviews the acts from a song contest roundly sneered upon (at least from within these shores) who'd failed to collect a single point for their efforts. This comedic potential collapses however through a repetitive routine of tracking down said artist, interviewing them (and opening old wounds in the process), hearing what they have done since (in most cases, not much) before moving onto the next one. It lacks the wit and sparkle of his earlier efforts and ends up being, sadly, a tad boring.
Bring back the donkey Tim!