The Internationalist Eurovision Blog

There's an update post coming soon but I am hoping to know the identity of some of the entries (cough, cough France, Spain & Switzerland) before getting into the meat and potatoes of some of the other exciting national finals going down. With that in mind, I thought I would take this opportunity to explore one of my personal favourite elements of the contest... the stage. Now, if you're not a die-hard Eurovision fan, you will probably have stopped reading by this point, but if you haven't, let me give you an opportunity to sway you on why this is so fascinating. Stages are in many ways representative of the identity of the contest, often they will be the biggest statement of the host country as to how they want their culture presented on an international scale. My personal favourite in this respect is the 1992 stage from Malmo where the stage was literally backed by a massive Viking ship motif (pictured below). (Eurovision 1992 Stage) In more modern times, this s

Happy New Year to all and with 2018 speeding into our lives, the new Eurovision season gets properly into full swing and us die-hard fans get our teeth stuck into the various entries from around Europe. There have been some highlights and low points of early days of the race to be the Eurovision winner (listening to all 60 of the Romanian entries was tedious to say the least). Nonetheless, it is good to be back in the world where we have songs coming out from all around Europe every day! Let's take a look at the national races in play for January and Early February. France Barring Cyprus announcing their song before France's national final on January 27th, the next song to be officially confirmed for Eurovision will be French! As a Brit and therefore a citizen of a big five nation, it is downright refreshing to see a country like France begin to strategise a path towards winning Eurovision and having much success in the process. It says a lot that last year's entry whic