A Soft Power Coup
Last Saturday, the UK became loved in Europe again (for the moment, at least). We came second in the Eurovision Song Contest, something we haven’t done since 1998. Between that date and now, our performance had been appalling. Once we had been regular winners or challengers (back in ’98, we held the record for coming second); after then, we hardly ever made it onto the top half of the scoreboard. The popular mantra became that this repeated failure showed that ‘they hate us’.
An Instant Guide to the Eurovision Final
So, this is it. 24 countries will be battling it out tonight for the Eurovision trophy. This is a glass model of an old-fashioned microphone, made by top Swedish designer Kjell Engman – who was a musician before going into design. It has led a hard life. Winner Alexander Rybak managed to break it in 2009, and it was damaged again in transit to Denmark after that country’s win in 2013. The show begins at 8pm UK time, though there will be some stuff before the first act, We are
Archetypes in Eurovision
Carl Gustav Jung is famous for his listing of human archetypes. He listed four main ones. No he didn’t; it was seven. No, it was twelve. No, twenty-four. He did list rather a lot of archetypes over his life. This ‘wheel’ showing twelve of them is a popular distillation of his work: https://conorneill.com/2018/04/21/understanding-personality-the-12-jungian-archetypes/. Eurovision often features ‘archetypal’ characters. The sexy lady, the confident young man (and so on). I thou
