What is the point of Eurovision?

Saturday evening saw the inception of a new Eurovision contest. The bastard offspring of The Eurovision Song Contest and Strictly Ballroom.

The ruthless all pervading publicity machine for the ‘event’ ensured I discovered it was on by chance on Saturday evening.

Given that there was little else on that was worth bothering with the CFD household watched out of curiosity.

As it turned out Finland won in the end, with quite a reasonable effort. Though one suspects, given the overall voting patterns, that the results would not have been much different if Finland had entered Rolf Harris doing a three legged tap dance.

Yes it was clearly infected with the same old inherently dodgy Eurovision voting.

I expect it would be possible to devise a formula to calculate the likely votes:

A large percentage seems to be based on good old-fashioned ‘national’ prejudices, both for and against.

Then there is the matter of how close a neighbour it is.

Then there is the political factor the “who do they need to suck up to right now” - and "who do they need to trash" factor.

Then finally there is the “was the act actually any good?” factor. This can have some impact but only seems to come into effect after the other influences.

The questions that really need answering are why we bother at all, given proven experience and the inherently corrupt voting system? Also why we contribute so much towards bankrolling such a farce?

One Eurovision contest is getting a bit too much these days, let alone two.