Party Vibe

TBH I only watched it as a kid as back then it was still exotic to hear foreign languages on the national TV, and I was curious about how all the different broadcasters worked together and how the telephone call voting worked (or sometimes it didn’t as international calls were a bit flaky then). Added to which as a 10 year old I thought Nicole was quite fit, though i have always found “Germanic” young women to be attractive as they are often both good looking and intelligent.

I always thought the fascination with the Eurovision song contest amongst the LGBT community was a recent thing and interlinked with a lot of them looking for full time careers in radio and TV presentation as well as much (it does seem to be a way of showing new talent from some countries). when I worked as a broadcast engineer all of my colleagues openly admitted that 90% of the songs are bland Europop (though the Northern European nations other than the BBC take it all more seriously)

when a small country wins it its not always popular with the finance department of the winning broadcaster as they have to often buy loads more equipment and special kit at the telecom company for when they host the next one; but SE and DK don’t seem to complain, SE celebrated winning by giving away full details on how to run your own small HD capable TV station with open source software (you still need about €10000 of kit, including a quad core PC with 4 HD graphics cards!)

The real reason for it is to raise awareness of the EBU who do a lot of very useful behind the scenes work with regard to broadcasting both on normal terrestrial radio/TV and online, especially public service broadcasting.

If I had been able to (without being nicked for terrorism) I’d have rigged up the PA at Thatcho’s funeral to play Nicole’s song, as Maggie must really have loathed 1982; not only did the BBC spend a fair bit of cash on hosting it in Harrogate (rather than London or Manchester), the Germans won the lot with an anti-war song :laugh_at:

Nicole still doesn’t look too bad these days (she is only 7 years older than me anyway)

I still remember when the trans woman from Israel won it; I was working as a broadcast engineer then and the Israel public TV had to buy a load of new equipment for 1999 as the EBU had said their current stuff was outdated; they bought a lot of it from where I then worked and sent over a young lad to the UK to assist with its testing and configuration (there was a few complex items like MADI interfaces (*) where were a real pain to set up (assuming you got one which didn’t have a dodgy circuit module to start with).

And they had left the lot until the last minute (this is something like 32RU of various control units, matrixes, switching panels all of which had to be programmed using some 1980s era software), about 1km of cable connects it all togetherl. I think we were also dealing with a big BBC contract and some other stuff so the lad came over to help us out as we would never have got that and all the other projects sorted in time. He jokingly said “the head of Finance at IBA, he say “I yi! yi! This nearly bankrupts us!”

that equipment is probably still there 15 years later (to be fair once it works it stays working).

(*) MADI – a multi channel digitial audio system that can use the coax cable commonly found in 1990s computer networks.