Peace Peace Love Love
Eurovision and our Value of the Week
You may have noticed that our Twitter feed this week has been a little bit Eurovisiony...and the staff daily briefing has been too!
Why?
Well, our value this week is Peace and the Eurovision Song Contest embodies this value so well - especially as a lot of the songs mention either peace or love in their lyrics!
The Eurovision Song Contest or in French: Concours Eurovision de la Chanson, is the longest-running annual international TV song competition.
It has been held, primarily, among the member countries of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) since 1956. The competition was based upon the existing San Remo Music Festival held in Italy since 1951.
The original idea was to unite Europe following the Second World War in an annual celebration of each others popular culture.
Each participating country submits an original song to be performed on live television and radio and then casts votes for the other countries' songs to determine the competition's winning entry.
The contest has been broadcast every year for sixty-two years, since its inauguration in 1956, and is one of the longest-running television programmes in the world. It is also one of the most watched non-sporting events in the world,with audience figures in recent years quoted as anything between 100 million and 600 million internationally.
Eurovision is broadcast outside Europe to several countries that do not compete, such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and China.
Since 2000, the contest has also been broadcast over the Internet via the Eurovision website.
Why not check out some of the more interesting Eurovision entrants and interval acts by tapping / clicking on the links below. We've even included a sign language version of our entry this year - Storm by Surie.
Finland Entry 2018 - in 43 languages!
