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Awards
Azerbaijan wins Eurovision
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 16 May 2011
So Azerbaijan (you know, just above Iran, to the left of the Caspian Sea, yes, that Azerbaijan) won the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time this weekend thanks to the country’s entrants Ell/Nikki (a duo, one of whom lives in London) whose song ‘Running Scared’ scored 221 points.
We in the UK again struggled to impress our European brethren with our entry, despite wheeling out former boy band Blue to both write and sing it, though coming eleventh with 100 points was an improvement on recent years, and at one point early on in the voting their song was actually in the lead. The BBC’s commentator Graham Norton joked: “Quick, someone take a picture”.
Despite the mixed success of our entry, the UK TV audience for the Eurovision show was up considerably, to 9.5 million viewers from 5.5 million last year, with a peak audience of 12.7 million. It outperformed ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ over on ITV, ironically possibly in part because of the appearance at the Song Contest of one of the outputs of ‘BGT’s sister show ‘X-Factor’, the Jedward boys, who were representing Ireland of course. They came in eighth on the night.
