Category: Eurovision

Welcome to Eurovision Island, where everything is douze points

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The 2014 Eurovision Song Contest will be held in a MacGyvered hall, which is part of a refurbished shipyard, on an island just off the coast of Denmark, relativly near to Copenhagen Honestly, the jokes write themselves. What will the Eurovision circus do when trapped on our own Charlie Brooker-esque Daily Mail Island? Daily Mail Island, a reality TV show where several normal people are deposited on an island and not allowed access to any media other than the strongly right-wing and conservative Daily Mail newspaper, leading to them becoming progressively more irrational and brutal as the series progresses – for

Why do writers who hate a topic get assigned that topic in the mainstream media?

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Toby Hadoke addresses some issues he has with the media’s coverage of television, actors, terminology, and ultimately about the lack of respect for the profession and the art: Revelling in ignorance about the medium you write about seems bizarre – especially when such ignorance is used to recommend somebody but, with a little implicit criticism, keep them in their place at the same time (and to what end – apart from to make the journalist look clever?). Looking clever feels terrific when you’re reviewing something, and it’s fantastic if you can enliven your prose with a witty barb or sparkly

Die Grosse Entscheidungs Show will be in the same year as Eurovision, for once.

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Just like that, the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 inches ever closer. Switzerland confirm the format and the dates for their National Final (February 1st 2014, Kreuzlingen), and I grab the usual hotel through Booking.com and get the flights lined up. (…and if this had said ‘Football club gets draw announced for European game, I’ve bought tickets’, it would be socially acceptable).

Download the Live Commentary iOS app for Eurovision

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A big thank you to The Lab at O2 for all their help in the last few weeks as they developed ESC Commentary, an IOS app to support the Eurovision Song Contest communities at ESC Insight and EscXtra. What does it do? You’ll get a live commentary from the team in the press room (and it’s not the same as our long running Alternative Commentary MP3, which you can find here). During each Eurovision show you can hit the green thumbs up button, or the red thumbs down button, to share your view on the song, and the worm will show the combined thoughts of