“In the End, Germany will Always Resort to Hot Pants”: Watching Europe Singing, Constructing the Stereotype

Abstract

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) is an annual popular music event that attracts millions of people who consume it with enthusiasm, irony, humor, but also sometimes with anger. The contest has been increasingly dressed with numerous stereotypes about the nation, Europe, and cultural difference. This paper looks at two different groups of ESC audiences in the UK and analyzes their engagement with the event and the stereotypes around it. The first audience group consists of participants in the BBC Online Forum debates and the second group consists of committed Eurovision audience members participating in focus group discussions. Findings show that the stereotype becomes a powerful, political, yet ambivalent, tool in making sense of cultural difference.

Notes

¹A definition of everyday racism is provided later in this article. Nationalism and everyday racism are not synonyms but in some popular culture domains, like the ESC consumption, the two ideologies often seem to come together.

²The European Song Contest was established in 1956 by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) as a political and cultural initiative aiming at enhancing the European cultural space and establishing European transnational media production. At the time of its introduction, the event was a major technological experiment, as it aimed to produce a live and parallel broadcasting event watched across many countries (www.eurovision.tv).

³Israel regularly participates in the event. Also, Morocco participated in the event in 1980 and though it refused to participate again as long as Israel is a participant, it still has the right to do so, as a member of the European Broadcasting Union.

⁴Three focus groups were organized in Leeds in summers 2006 and 2007. The participants were British students between the ages 18–24. The focus groups, taking place in real time and consisting of face to face group encounters, form a rather different method compared to the online textual analysis of the BBC Forum debates. It is possible that the methodological differences played a role in the production of different kinds of results (e.g., signs of everyday racism were not obvious in the focus group discussions, though very visible on the online debates). Apart from any methodological bias, the difference of the sample seems to play the main part in the different kinds of engagement with the event. The BBC Forum participants, in their vast majority, were not ESC fans and enthusiasts, while the participants in the focus groups were.