Eurovision pong remains the same

THE Eurovision Song Contest has become as famous for political skulduggery as it has for its naff music, and now a statistician has checked to see how biased it is.

No matter how awful the song, Greece can always be relied on to give a maximum 12 points to Cyprus and Russia will vote for the Ukraine.
Last year's political voting was so blatant that commentator Terry Wogan described it as ridiculous.
With this year's final this weekend, a British statistician has revealed the scale of "back-scratching" voting among neighbouring countries.
He has found that vote trading has spread in the past decade, and only seven out of 43 countries taking part are above suspicion.
Britain - with its long tradition of voting for Ireland - is not one of them.
The depressing news for this year's Brit hopeful - X-Factor runner-up Andy Abraham - is that the Eastern European power blocs are so strong, West European countries have little hope of winning.
"In the early 1990s, the only really strong power bloc was Greece and Cyprus," said statistician Dr Derek Gatherer, who researches Eurovision voting as a hobby.
Dr Gatherer fed the results of every Eurovision vote since 1975 into a computer and looked for unusual patterns.
He identified three major power blocs - one centred on the Balkans, another on the former Warsaw Pact nations and a third on Scandinavia.
"The song is still important but around a third of the votes come from bloc-vote trading," Dr Gatherer said.
The voting patterns may also partly be explained by shared tastes as a result of close proximity.
"But that can't explain why there is a lot more of this sort of voting than there was 10 years ago," he said. DAILY MAIL