Conchita Wurst

The first Eurovision Song Contest was in 1956. And in the beginning, there were seven. Long before the arrival of Eurovision icons like ABBA and Conchita Wurst, ...

Russia is excluded, but it is not the first country to be barred from participation: Romania was banned in 2016 over debts owed to the EBU by its broadcaster. It's testament to the border-defying, gloriously crazy appeal of Eurovision that outside Sweden, not many people noticed: He was awarded 26 points, which is 26 more than his Norwegian neighbor Jahn Teigen with Mil Etter Mil. Leader Mikhail Gorbachev overruled it, and the EBU may not have allowed a non-member to partake anyway - but all that changed in the 1990s. Israel's participation has also caused political problems in parts of the Arab world which do not, or did not, recognize the country. That took the number of contestants up to about 20 per year – but Europe was about to change significantly. Although viewers across Europe dug out their old school atlas to see if Israel was in Europe, they were wasting their time: the entry mechanism is not geographical, but is contingent on membership of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes and transmits the contest.