Eurovision Blues

Eurovision came and went again. I wrote about the impact of automatically qualifying for the final for Significance, (as well as rehashing an old Statscream post whilst I was at it). Azerbaijan won, which was nice, but mostly because it earnt me some £££. I would have liked somewhere closer to home so I could go next year, but I don't think I'm quite ready for Baku yet.

Surprisingly, Italy (returning to the contest for the first time since 1997) came second, despite having a song that struck me as being not very Eurovision-y at all. Nevertheless, it gives us an excuse to compare where the votes for a Western European country come from with somewhere rather more Eastern. To that end - maps! First up, Azerbaijan's points - did they all come from those mysterious Eastern countries which are surprisingly difficult to find on a map?

Hmm, pretty much. How about Italy? Were they equivalently well supported by their Western allies?

It seems so. Strong evidence of the Eurovision politics we all know and love? Maybe. This is of course an entirely non-rigorous look at the question of bloc voting (the BBC did a good article about this a few years ago if you fancy something more thorough), but is quite a nice visual illustration of how this year's top two fared.

"What about Blue?" I hear you say? Well they had reasonably pan-European support, although with a definite Eastern leaning to it. If we'd won over a bit more of the west we might have done slightly better than a mere 11th, but at least we didn't come last. Again.