According to Swedish newspapers, the longstanding UK commentator Terry Wogan has now declared the ultimate reason to the British debacle in Belgrade: Andy Abraham is black and all of Eastern Europe is racist. Those people in the East would never vote for anyone of a different skin colour.
What is this? Seriously? Are we back in South Africa in the 80's? I am not denying there are racial issues going on a bit here and there on our old continent (oppression takes place due to skin colour, religion, sexuality and a lot of other things), but to claim that a last place comes down only to an issue of skin colour... That stinks!
Time to open your eyes up and realise that only TWO countries out of a possible forty-two voted for your song. Will you get the UN to put sanctions against the rest of us? Or are you so old-fashioned you demand us to vote for you only BECAUSE you were brave enough to selected a coloured singer?
We just thought your song was dull and un-inspired and nothing we were ready to waste our money televoting for. Try harder next time and leave the pathetic exuses on the shelf, please.
Dansband + Youtube = sant
4 years ago
6 comments:
Well, as I posted in another forum, Eastern Europe tends to have its own racisms, directed towards roma or neighbouring minorities rather than black people. The attitude towards black people tends to be bemused rather than hostile, at least in Hungary where my mother comes from.
The few black performers that have been in Eurovision previously have done okay (Sweden 2002) or actually gone on and won it (Estonia 2001). And it's not like the Eurovision audience is well-known for being especially intolerant - I mean look at the success of acts like Dana International or Serbia last year, if the audience had all been right-wing extremist racists do you think they'd vote for homo- and transexuals?
I agree partially with birdseed, although I must confess that I'm not at all surprised by this accusation.
Just sounds like the normal xenophobic remarks coming from the UK, and/or anglophone world.
That's a pretty recist thing to say in itself oskyldig. Don't tar us all with the same brush. We are not all the same.
I think Terry should give up the ghost. The only reason he's defending this song so much is that if it wasn't for him, we wouldn't have been repesented by Andy.
Well said Schlagerprick, not everyone in the UK agrees with xenophobic/racist comments from Terry Wogan.
Don't forget the UK were very successful in 1998 and ofcourse in2001 there was a black winner. We hope people vote on the merits of the song and performance, although as the EBU say you will never know the factors that people consider when televoting.
The British televoting public would agree with Tobias' comments, after all, was Andy number 1 in the UK charts...? (He peaked at number 67 and last week was at number 97!) The British public didn't support the song either.
Hopefully it is nothing to do with race, it is simply to do with having a disappointing song.
We'd love Terry's job, time for him to retire!
You cant really say that the UK didnt support it because the BBC didnt give it a full release (the people that voted for the song are hardly going to buy downloads!)
I think it could be prejudice, but not because he's black but because he's British. Attitudes to Britain (and vice versa) aren't that great in Europe - particularly in central europe - of late and when choosing between countries its natural to choose a country to see favorably (in the same way we do Scandinavia)
We need to face we face an unhill struggle if we want to come top 10, we're not Russia, our only natural voting ally is Ireland and that isnt alot in the 43-country grand scheme of things!!
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