Nul Points

A hilariously funny book about the Eurovision Song Contest.

Fifty years after Jetty Paerl took to the Lugano stage and burst into “The Birds of Holland,” the Eurovision Song Contest is still luring 450 million Europeans to the sofa on a Saturday night in May every year. But where once they settled down to admire the “top-quality original songwriting” that the contest was inaugurated to showcase, the Eurovision Song Contest, throughout the post-Abba decades, has come to mean “entertainment” for all the wrong reasons: magnificent foolishness and stubborn reinforcement of the crudest national stereotypes, and a scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship and hatred.

And as post-modern connoisseurs of showbiz meltdown, the audience has shifted its focus from the blandly competent winners to the spangled, hapless losers. It is here that the gold standard of farcical failure, the benchmark of badness, is to score NUL POINTS, and where sympathetic understanding is replaced by brutal guffaws.

Darkly fascinated with those whose lives are shadowed by the entertainment world’s most grandiose humiliation, Tim Moore sets off to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who have come and gone without troubling the scorers. From Lisbon to Lithuania, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Moore travels the continent to hear their stories — “poignant, ludicrous and heartwarming in equal measure” — recounting as he does so the history of that towering cathedral of cheese, the Eurovision Song Contest itself.