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Abstract
This article considers how the Eurovision Song Contest in the UK has come to be seen as a moment of cultural embarrassment. As a showcase for national identities, Eurovision gives rise to contemporary unease about cultural disembeddedness, the state-centric nature of national identity and the gap between globalized/American popular culture and European/ethnic cultural forms. The paper explores Terry Wogan's use of ironic commentary to both embrace and distance himself and his audience from the embarrassment of Eurovision and looks at responses to his commentary on the BBC website. The paper concludes by considering technologies of worldliness that construct internationalism differently from Eurovision.
Notes
1The entry on “Nationalism” in the 2001 edition of The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Music states, “There were pre-echoes in the circumbaltic and northern Slavonic lands, but it was above all in the writings of post-Kantian German philosophers such as Herder and Fichte that the translation of Enlightenment political thought into cultural nationalism was most clearly effected and articulated.” (CHNCM, 2001, pp. 570–571)