Virginia Ironside

From Zeroes to Heroes

Nul Points

By

Jonathan Cape 378pp £12 order from our bookshop

It must have sounded such a good idea for a book – tracking down all the total losers in the Eurovision Song Contest from the very year of its inception, fifty years ago, and interviewing the lot of them. Huge gay market. Potential European-wide sales. After all, the Contest is a show that attracts a television audience of 450 million viewers, and those who aren’t watching for the sheer simple fun of it are watching to piss themselves laughing at the whole loopy, cheesy idiocy of it all. Even Terry Wogan’s commentary is, for quite a lot of the time, strictly tongue-in-cheek. I can imagine them rubbing their hands at Jonathan Cape. 

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