If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Last week was the 50th Anniversary Eurovision Show, ‘Congratulations’. We watched it on Sky+ today. It was very, very poor.

I’m not sure whether it was the programme itself or the fact we had to watch the Spanish version as the BBC refused to show it, so we’d taped it off TVE. The Spanish commentators were truly awful. A hundred times worse than Wogan, and that’s saying something. Perhaps the BBC had a premonition it would be far from good. Probably down to the fact that all the once-beautiful singers are now fat and wrinkled, and none of them were singing in person - they were just showing tapes of the original performances with Pans’ People-style dancers swishing around below the big screens.

And then, 153 minutes into the 160 minute show, the ‘End of Recording’ banner came up and slapped itself over Ronan Keating’s face. It happens every time we try and record from Spanish TV.

Fortunately I knew Abba had won already, so it wasn’t a disaster, but it was annoying. Jon had watched it on German TV, so he saw it all, but that didn’t stop him emailing the BBC:

I should like to complain about the failure of the BBC to cover the 50th celebration of Eurovision last night.

I was fortunately able to watch the programme on satellite on the German TV channel WDR, albeit with a German commentary over the English speaking presenters. It was extremely entertaining and provided an excellent opportunity to see again highlights of over 50 years of an European institution and I am sure would have been popular with many viewers. Considering the number of low interest programming the BBC screens, surely the BBC could have found a slot on one of its many channels? If it was not considered of sufficent mass interest for BBC 1 - why not the minority channel BBC 3?

Are there any plans to screen edited highlights as UK viewers have to date only been able to watch it on satellite on WDR or the Spanish channel TVE Internacional?

Your disappointedly

And the BBC replied…

Thank you for your e-mail.

I understand you are annoyed that the BBC did not broadcast the Eurovision 50th Anniversary extravaganza from Copenhagen.

The BBC has a long standing commitment to Eurovision, and it’s one which has increased over the years. BBC ONE now screens the hugely popular UK selection show, ‘Making Your Mind Up’, as well as the incredible final itself. Consequently it was felt that audiences would be better served for the BBC to concentrate all of its efforts on making these valued productions the best they can possibly be.

I have checked our programme schedules and there are no plans to transmit a highlight programme of the event.

For future scheduling queries you may find the BBC What’s On site of some use as it covers all BBC television and radio stations. The link is as below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/whatson/

I hope I have gone some way into explaining the situation however I do recognise your disappointment.

Please be assured that your complaint has been registered and placed on an audience log which is made available to all members of the BBC including senior editors and programme schedulers.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact the BBC with your complaint.

Very diplomatic.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 30th, 2005 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.