Nul Points

Once every year, on a Saturday night in May, occurs a festival of kitsch inanity called the Eurovision Song Contest. It entertains us for all the wrong reason: we chortle at it's mindlessness, its stubborn reinforcement of the crudest national stereotypes, at a scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border amity and hatred. It's a ludicrous lame farce, three hours of Austrian power ballads, hand-jiving Latvians and Maltese electro-folk.

Tim Moore's 'Nul Points' is at once a celebration of the Eurovision Song Contest, its one high point (Abba singing 'Waterloo') and its many low ones. Among the latter are of course the legendary songs that manage to receive not one point from the scorers, a feat that only the very worst achieve. There are fourteen such songs, from ten different countries, and in this hilariously funny book Tim Moore sets off to discover form the singers themselves just what it is like to find yourself atop that lonely, windswept summit of Mount Fiasco.