Can The Pope Win Eurovision?
With Eurovision just around the corner Richard & Marina bring your burning Eurovision questions to Executive Supervisor Martin Österdahl and Brand Director Martin Green.
Plus, we talk Klingon, Elvish and Klanger - how are fake languages for movies are created, and how you can get a degree in them.
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Transcript
This episode is brought to you by our friends at Sky.
And when we say friends, we mean friends with excellent taste in television.
Absolutely.
And diving into my never-ending TV list is so seamless.
Sky does all the hard work for me by bringing whatever I want to watch across all my apps and channels into one place.
Now, let's not forget the blockbuster shows they bring us, Gangs of London, Day of the Jackal.
All the different apps, all in one place.
I like to say effortless input, exceptional output.
Do you like that?
Love it.
They keep us entertained and give us plenty to talk about.
They do.
And let's be honest, we love a a good chat.
We do, Marina.
That's why I love voice search.
It's like having your very own TV assistant.
Just say what you're in the mood for, and boom.
I've just got into the habit of saying Glenn Powell into my remote, and Sky will pull up everything he's in.
It's like magic.
Yeah, if I know Skye in a few years, Glenn Powell will literally walk into your room.
So be really careful what you say.
If you know Glenn Powell, he will.
Yeah.
For now, stick to telly.
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Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Wrestling Entertainment Questions and Answers Edition.
Element of Special here.
I'm Marina Hyde.
Element of Special here being about the program.
Sorry, yeah.
If I try to introduce anything to that opening sequence, it just does derail still, doesn't it?
Doesn't it?
So, and I'm Richard Osman.
Yes, Richard Osman.
Always have been, always will be.
Now.
Now, for the second half of this questions and answers,
this is an absolute mess so far.
It is, it's a dog's breakfast.
However, we have got something of a Eurovision special.
So many of you sent your questions in, and we were able to put them to entities known as the two Martins: Martin Green, who's the director of the Eurovision Song Contest, and Martin Eusterdahl, who is the Eurovision Song Contest Executive Supervisor.
Oh, we have some great questions, they've given us great answers as well.
So, that'll be after the break.
But first, let's do some non-Eurovision questions.
Is that crazy?
I have a question for you about fake languages, Marina.
Now, this comes from Sammy.
Sammy has neglected to give us a surname.
And the whole problem is, that's where you have to give surnames.
Otherwise, Martin Green and Martin Ersterdahl, we wouldn't know who was who.
No.
That's why we use surnames.
So Sammy McLamy, let's say, like a Scottish David Lamy.
Sammy McLamy asks, my question is how much work goes into making fake languages on TV shows?
Are they just saying any old gibberish or is there actually a lot of work that has gone into the making of it?
Oh, okay.
I happen to know quite a lot about what are called conlangs, constructed languages.
When you hear these things on TV, it obviously ranges from the equivalent of people going re-bob, re-bob, re-bob, and it is just obvious gibberish, to really sophisticated constructed languages.
Like Tolkien is one of the first people who does this in The Lord of the Rings and Cimeronian and all things like that.
There are various different languages, but even elvish languages, there's two of them, Quenya and Sindarin.
And they're the most developed.
Well, they're quite like Welsh and Finnish.
Tolkien was like an amazing linguist and he was a professor and everything.
Nonetheless, they're not completely codified.
You couldn't like learn to speak it from the books.
But what he did is he created root words and therefore the films when they came to them were able to work on those roots and kind of so you know you'd have words that sort of connote things to do with water and words that can, I don't know, connote things to do with stopping.
So you'd put them together and you'd have someone who's like a lockkeeper or a dam builder or something like that.
You don't hear the word connote that often, do you?
Well, I don't know why.
And listen, it's great.
I love it.
Honestly, my language skills, genuinely, after this podcast, are so much better than they were.
I think you're not being entirely serious, and I quite deserve it.
That's fine.
Now, AI can obviously create you one of these languages so quickly now, and they can just whip you up anything.
But many were created before AI would do it for you.
Like, Woodship Down has lap in.
That was quite sophisticated.
Klingon, now, Klingon is starting.
You can learn that, right?
Yeah.
Mark Ockrund was the person who created that.
And there's a whole grammar, vocabulary, very developed.
As always, there's kind of university courses.
And actually if you study linguistics at university you can look at certain
like Navi from the Avatar films they actually took some time you know James Cameron had to be sort of so fastodious about building the world they you can study the building of that language imagine how disappointed you'd be in your children if they went to university and they studied navi they go what are you learning mechanical engineering Navi from the Avatar films.
Well, maybe they'd be doing...
No, but they're doing linguistics.
Well, hopefully they would be.
Yes.
Game of Thrones obviously had quite a few.
They had Dothraki and High Valerian and things like that.
HBO developed those languages because in the books they didn't really exist.
In George R.
R.
Martin's books, they didn't really exist.
What is HBO and Dothraki?
I don't know.
They spend no time watching it, which makes me feel, you know, someone needs to really tell them to do that instead of go to war the whole time.
District 9, that had a lot.
Do you remember District 9, the aliens, they descend on basically Johannesburg?
And Parcel Tongue and Harry Potter, that is basically gibberish, but it's sort of mesmerising and kind of whispery and you kind of want to listen to that.
Navvi, I said, didn't I?
That was a guy called Paul Frommer.
Dr.
Paul Frommer developed it with all its special syntax and phonetics and all of that.
Minionese is the last one.
Yeah, be a coffin.
There's quite a lot of nonsense in that, as well as kind of little bits from other languages, but it's sort of funny and that's why it works because you can recognize it's like a sort of form of kind of comic Esperanto in a weird way.
So there's lots of different ones.
But now, as I say, I mean, you could just get AI to kind of knock you up a language.
I don't know if anyone's actually done that, but it's relatively easy compared to before when they would kind of enlist all these people to create something so that people could speak in these languages to make it authentic.
Like the greatest made-up languages really are Pingu's language and the clangers as well, which are lovely because they just have the rhythm.
of speech but making noises like when Charlie Brown's talking on the telephone.
Those are the languages I understand because we recognize the rhythm of a joke, we recognise the rhythm of a question, all of those things.
You realize how much of language is rhythm when you just sort of, you know, you could do a podcast that was, you know, just going to, oh,
boom,
oh, boom, boom, boom, boom,
oh, and those kind of strange ethereal noises of the clangers, like the music of the spheres.
Do you know what?
I nearly did the clangers, and I thought, I don't think the microphone could take it.
No, I know.
I was thinking,
no, I won't chime in here.
Now, of course, people try and understand where it can be codified.
And since the advent of the internet, which came after things like Klingon was invented, yeah.
But people have tried to codify all these languages, and there are lots of different, and as I say, there are even university courses.
I reckon you could do an entire, I'd love for someone to do this, it must be doable, do an entire episode of The Rest is Politics, put it into Pingo language, listen to it, and still have a pretty rough idea of what Rory and Alistair were talking about.
What a challenge.
You've suddenly laid down a gauntlet there.
If someone could do just a little exchange from the two of them in Pingo language.
Send it in.
We'd love to see you.
I don't know why I didn't say our podcast.
I did.
Anyway, have you got a question for me?
Yes, I do have a question for you.
It's about fake languages.
I just asked it to you.
Sorry if it's confusing.
Can I ask you about the dance?
Yes, I was going to say, shall we take it in turns?
Can I ask you about the darts?
And walk-on music.
Gareth Parton has asked.
Good surname.
Strong surname.
And actually, a nice greeting at the start.
G'day, Richard Imarina.
I wonder where he's from.
I'm living in Melbourne, Australia.
Brackett's British expat.
And I enjoyed the Snooker World Championships from afar.
What would your intro music be, and what would your moniker be?
Monica is...
I always think it's confusing that moniker is also someone's name.
Yeah.
If you've got moniker, moniker is your moniker.
I did Let's Play Darts for Comic Relief and my walk-on music was I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller by Skilo, which is great.
I've talked about this before.
I'm sure I had Britain's tallest woman was my bodyguard and a guy who was seven foot two as well.
And I was the big Frimley giant because it was at Frimley Green.
But I think if I really was a professional dance player, I'd like to be called the Chiswick flyover.
This doesn't make any sense, but I think.
No, I love it though.
There's something about it that I love.
I think it sounds pretty good.
How about you?
I would be Marina Nowhere to Hide because
that I know my music.
So wait a minute.
So your nickname is NowhereTwo.
Yeah.
Okay.
Which sounds like a horror film.
Nowhere to.
Which is, honestly, it's made like 18 times its size.
It sounds like it's a real indie thing that won like some golden bear claw or somewhere.
I cannot wait for Nowhere Three.
Okay.
Now, my music is not even...
a contest.
It would be the theme from Stingray, Marina, Aquamarina.
Do you remember?
Yes.
Now, that was written by Barry Gray, performed by Gary Miller and the Barry Gray Orchestra.
And I would ask them to do something with the lighting so it all felt like we were, as it came on, you know, Marina, Aquamarina.
What are these strange enchantments that start whenever you're near?
It would all be blue, like the lighting, so it would feel like we were underwater as I came in.
Marina, nowhere to hide.
Do you think they would be able to do that in all the venues?
I would make it a condition of my attendance.
They tend not to do kind of underwater type things on.
It's just a lot.
It's actually a really basic lighting effect that you could do in a student theatre, Richard.
And I'm pretty sure they'd be, unless you're saying they can't manage it, which I'm pretty sure they could.
Yeah, if Barry Hearn is listening, Barry, could you do an underwater light effect for Marina?
Barry will tell us.
And also tell us how much it cost.
He said, I'll do it.
It'll cost you.
The best darts nickname is Mark Frost, who was called Frosty the Throwman.
Yeah, you're right.
It's unbeautable.
But it's amazing having, you know, Luke Humphreys and Luke Littler, because you think obviously the first Luke is always going to get the coolest nickname.
So Luke Humphreys is Cool Hand Luke, which is a great nickname.
And then Luke Littler comes along.
They've still got Luke the nuke.
Yeah.
It's still there.
I mean, that's a good first name.
And long and strong.
They've got plenty more, I think.
Yeah, haven't they, Just?
And yet, can't think of one off the top of their head.
What, Luke?
Yeah.
Luke, I am your father.
Yeah.
That would be a good one.
That's a drama.
Yeah.
Luke, stop and listen.
Luke at what I'm about to do.
Yeah.
Luke, I'm really good at darts.
Luke, who's talking?
Luke who's talking to.
Yeah, yeah.
Luke Humphrey should have been called Luke Who's Talking, and then Luke Literally should have been called Luke Who's Talking To.
Come on, guys.
You know what?
Just one on the seniors tour.
Yeah.
Rob Walker there, who does all the walk-ons at the snooker, and it kind of ramps up the audience and stuff.
But he's the one.
He comes up with the nicknames.
for all the players.
He kind of invents them.
So the older ones, obviously Hurricane Higgins and Whirlwind White.
And now Jiao Jingtong, who is the world champion, is the Cyclone.
We've been waiting for a while for a Cyclone.
James Waternow was the Typhoon, I think.
But yeah, he makes he fits you with your.
He fits you with your.
And you know, if you're the first time playing at the Crucible, he'll give you his name.
Like Luca Brussel, who was the world champion a couple of years ago, he came up with the name the Belgian Bullet.
It often is the country you're from and something that suggests velocity.
But now in some snooker tournaments, yeah, they have walk-on music as well.
You can always tell a lot about players from the walk-on music that they use.
The snookers' nicknames are not quite as good as dance nicknames.
I have to say, I agree with you or not.
It's John Higgins.
You go.
Mark Williams is the Welsh potting machine.
It sounds like something you're going to get.
Yes, just right at the end by the tail.
Ronnie, of course, has got the rocket, and that's great.
That is pretty much unimpeachable.
The worst one of all, of course, is Mark Selby, who is the jester from Leicester.
And you're like, I mean, he's, I love Mark Selby, but he's not, you know, he's not Michael McIntyre.
So, well, Rob Walker not brook the idea of people being able to come up with their own names.
Well, there was a time in snooker pre-Rob Walker.
Yeah.
I know it's difficult for modern fans to appreciate that.
And so a lot of those are are heritage nicknames.
But now if you're playing in your first tournament, he will assign you a nomination.
I think he should loosen his vice-like grip on the nomenclature and people should be able to just chime in with their own thing.
I love it.
But also you can tell some of the names don't age like brilliantly.
Like when Ding Junwe was the first big Chinese star in Snooker, immediately he was called Enter the Dragon.
And you're like, okay.
Yeah.
I sort of get it.
And now the nicknames
tend to be just
about the person rather than
something.
But we've got one from over there.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
Dart nicknames in general, which people come up with themselves, I think, are slightly more evolved than snooker nicknames.
And of course, the darts walk on music.
So the big thing in darts, apart from the World Championship and all that, is if you get to play in the Premier League, it's eight people each year who gets play in the Premier League.
And it's a big tour around the country.
Huge numbers, like big money as well.
So if you get into that eight-player league, you're making an absolute fortune.
And there's a guy called Nathan Aspinall, nicknamed the Asp, and he would have been on the bubble, just on the cusp of, you know, is he seventh, eighth, ninth?
What would he be?
But his walk-on music is Mr.
Brightside.
And people go absolutely nuts when it's played.
The whole place absolutely goes off.
And there are people who said, you know what?
Because he was on the cusp, having Mr.
Brightside as his walk-on music was the thing that just knocked him into eighth place in that league.
So they can be very, very lucrative.
pieces of walk-on music.
Luke Humphreys was accused of stealing his I Predictor Riot.
I remember, yeah.
Because he's from Leeds, and Kaiser Chiefs from Leeds.
And there was a player a while back who used I Predictor Riot, but it sort of suits Luke Humphreys better.
But yeah, so if you're the ninth best dance player in the world, my advice would be choose a great piece of Walcon music and you'll double your earnings.
Now, I absolutely love that.
We've got a huge number of questions about Eurovision.
Do you think we should go to a break now so that we can fully service this particular banquet of music?
I have to say, even if you're not a Eurovision fan, there are some fun questions
and some fun answers as well.
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Welcome back, everybody.
Now, it's Eurovision's Song Contest this weekend, the semi-finals all week as well, with so many questions about Eurovision that we felt like we had to get some experts to talk to us.
So we got Martin Green and Martin Ustadahl.
Let's just get a little clip from both of them so you understand exactly what it is they do, what's the difference they do, and also just because we get to enjoy Martin Österdahl's wonderful Swedish accent.
Well, hi, Marina and Richard.
Thanks for having us on.
It's great to be here.
My name's Martin Green and I'm the director of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Yeah, hello and thanks for having us on.
I'm Martin Osterdahl.
I'm the executive supervisor of the Eurovision Song Contest.
So I primarily look after the show itself.
Everything that happens on stage, everything in the contest.
Yeah, he gets the fun stuff.
I think the best way to start.
I look after the brand.
So I'm looking at it's sort of more of a year-round thing
and constantly in conversation with my colleague here about what we can do for the future.
Patsy Davis, this is a good one to start with, I think.
It seems like the most complex gig of all time to plan, organise, and execute on the night, given it's live broadcast to not only every European member state, but all over the world.
Can you talk through how it all works and approximately how many people are involved from performers to country point hosts, jurors and the in-between?
Surely it must be one of, if not the, biggest TV event in the world, Martin and Martin.
Well, thanks for that question, Patsy.
How many hours do I get?
Well, how to explain it?
First of all, there are 37 this year, 37 delegations which are representing their countries.
They come from the national broadcasters or the state broadcaster of each country.
They come in a group of 25, 27, 29 people.
So it's 37 times all those people.
But then of course also backstage we have a production crew and the production crew is usually a couple of hundred like five six hundred people.
On top of that you have everyone else working with the host broadcaster organization which adds several hundred more and then you have an additional four or five hundred working from the city.
You have a similar number of volunteers, probably even more volunteers.
You have international and national press in sometimes you know more than more than a thousand
all in all i mean one way to measure the the amount of people that actually one way or another contribute to these shows is to count the the badges that we're all wearing when we're inside the the venue area and those in that system we typically print uh
around 10 or 11 or even 12,000.
We're actually up this year.
There are 14,000 accredited people to Eurovision this year.
I think what some viewers probably don't realize is yes, we have two live finals and a grand final, but each of those shows have two dress rehearsals with a full audience and an extra dress rehearsal with no audience to begin with.
So we run the show 12 times in five days.
By the end of the week, the show is so long that the audience coming out are meeting the audience coming in.
And I, you know, there's a great way to put this.
If you do the Brits at the O2 in London, let's say, you're in and out of that venue in four days.
We are in this venue for seven weeks
and that kind of gives you an idea of the complexity of it.
You've got a live audience, 37 acts, 37 live links into the show to do the voting.
I said someone the other day, you know, I've produced an Olympic opening ceremony and this is far more complicated.
Well, I remember when I first produced this show back in 2013,
we had Lady Gaga's World Tour as the biggest event after us coming in.
And I think that World Tour, which was the biggest of that time, had 37 semi-trailers of technology.
We came in to Malmo Arena at that time with 97.
We are now over 200 semi-trailers of technology that are unloaded in the initial week of those seven or eight weeks that we're in the venue.
We're the biggest music show in the world.
I mean, you know, it's not spin.
You know, 160 million people watch us.
We have votes from 150 countries.
The engagement on our digital now, which is the modern phenomenon, is just off the charts.
And there's a great stat, which is 35% of our audience is under 25.
And for a lot of broadcasters, that is a holy grail.
And we're continuing to see kids engage in this.
We've got Roblox this year as well.
Eurovision is on Roblox.
So it continues.
I love Martin and Martin.
Yeah, so do I.
Isn't that amazing?
But that is genuinely extraordinary.
As he says, it's bigger than doing an Olympic opening ceremony.
And I have to say that when they were saying it's the biggest thing in the world, you're thinking, okay, things like the Olympics are a bigger technical challenge if we've discussed on this before, but not all telescoped onto sort of one live event.
That's across the fortnight or whatever.
Yeah, that we just sit down and go on social media and say, oh my god, I can't believe what Moldova are wearing.
And those guys have to just give you like every single thing out of it.
16,000 security passes.
It would actually be quicker just to give people passes if they're not allowed in.
I just, it would be
that is enormous.
I'm actually interested in another question then, jumping off the back of that, because given that they have that many people watching, 160 million people, Nina Marriott says, which European country likes Eurovision the most by population share?
I always assumed it would be Sweden.
Actually, by the way, I saw a really funny interview with Remember Monday, the UK entry, and they were talking about meeting the Swedish entry.
And the Swedish were like, yeah, no, we're like a real null points country.
And they're they're like no sorry sorry by the way you're like topping the leaderboard with I can't remember Ireland is it Brits are the norm country come on guys you are not a normal point country no way
you are Eurovision royalty so here's Martin and Martin to answer your question Nina Well, they're all quite big.
I think what I know is that I think it's Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK who have huge audiences.
Obviously, it's all proportional.
If you want to look at share, Iceland is like 60 odd percent of the viewing public are watching us.
And then you go into things like our digital audiences, where we had...
It's like 6 billion different interactions last year.
So that half of the show, because I see half of everything we do is digital now, is just exploding because we have this perfect format.
We are still one of the last appointment-to-view linear television events where people will sit down at 8 or 9 o'clock with a group of people to watch it on the Saturday May.
But we produce 37 new pieces of content every year and all their derivatives.
And we therefore have this perfect format for digital as well.
So our numbers are just extraordinary and really interestingly growing.
So Iceland, the answer there.
Doesn't surprise me.
I love the Icelandics.
Amazing.
I can't believe we're not going to be together for this contest.
It's all wrong.
I'm having to lie fallow for a year party-wise.
Yes, you normally have a Eurovision party, but I'm living in a building site, putting out an API.
I told you not to buy a building site.
I said, buy a house.
I told you.
On this, as on so many other matters, I should have listened to you.
Yeah, the rest is property.
I'll tell you what, we also want to know, Martins.
What about things?
We always want to know about this on this show.
What about things going wrong?
Again, how many hours have you got?
Well,
shall I?
Yeah, I mean, what's the most stressed me out?
Yeah,
I mean, it's live, right?
So
everything changes, everything happens.
And things do go wrong I mean when you're doing a live show like this you will you will probably
we will we will see a lot of things that go wrong and hear you know on the intercom things that go wrong cameras go down for instance like all of these cameras that we have they are most often working but sometimes they go down and if they go down we have we have a multi-camera script for each act and of course then we have to start finding another camera for that particular shot.
So the acts are usually made up of something like 90 to 130 different shots.
So there's a lot of editing and cutting going on between cameras.
And of course, things like that happen all the time.
But hopefully you at home should not notice too much.
We've got hundreds of the world's best production people working on this.
And I remember when I was on the other side of this and I was working on the show in Liverpool, I started phoning people up to work on it.
And you only get a year as notice.
And I was saying to people, look, will you do the show?
And they said, give me half an hour to dump everything i'm doing because everybody wants to work on this show and you end up with the most ludicrously talented team and that's why we're lots and lots could go wrong touch wood barely anything usually does because the team is just extraordinary the rehearsals the backups the power backups the power backups to the power backups it goes on and on and on and on um but yeah it's uh it's you still are tense from the moment it starts to the moment it finishes you you are in a state of great tension and i think one of the one of the things that make eurovision so special and so great is the courageous creativity from the artists and and and their teams and they're pushing boundaries we're pushing boundaries in tech but also in in staging so you know all these props that you see the famous eurovision song concerts props um you know hopefully they work uh they usually they do during rehearsals but sometimes you know something does not work and then you have to manage your way around it there's great videos on YouTube and maybe we should drop one in here of of the crew doing the 40 second change between acts it is a work of art and a ballet and and really worth checking out unbelievable to when you think of how different the staging is for each song and every year you look at that and then you just think oh hang on it's all live I'm always amazed by how little goes wrong on that show it is genuinely extraordinary I mean you know you host an episode of the one show and that's hard enough and you know that's half an hour it's just some VTs and some studio guests yeah it's absolutely extraordinary Perhaps we'll attach one of those videos to the end of this as well, to the YouTube version, because I'd be fascinated to see it.
These guys are great.
Yeah.
I love them both.
Yes, me too.
James Parsons has this question.
There always seems to be a long delay between the host country and the spokesperson of each country.
Why is this always the case on live TV?
And how confusing is it when people stop, start talking when presenting live?
Well, thanks for that question, Jamie.
The reason for that delay has to do with satellite connections.
And yes, yes, it is confusing sometimes.
And that's why we try to minimize the sort of back and forth between the host and the spokesperson in that segment, because it does drag on a bit.
Has it got better over the years?
Yes.
New tech.
But yes, some broadcasters have fibre connectivity and some others don't.
But
the delay is actually
caused by that satellite connection.
You realize you should have paused before you answered that question.
Yeah, I should.
That's Martin saying fibre connectivity in the voice of somebody who has had many meetings about fibre connectivity in the last few years.
And is absolutely trying not to judge individual nation states or whether they've got it or they haven't.
Well, they don't.
When I did the votes for the UK jury, which I've said before, is my favorite thing I've ever done, you can see even in that, every single belt and brace was put, you know, you were in place like four hours beforehand.
You're on a wireless mic, you're also on a plugged-in mic.
You know, you're not allowed to move from the room you're at.
You do a proper rehearsal, and they're right about that thing of not having too much back and forth.
They say, we will say this, give us the exact script of what you are going to say, we will then say this, and then you say your thing.
So, actually, it gets over most of those issues.
Sometimes you will get juries who want to do a bit of banter, and that you cannot really do because of that delay.
You know, but sometimes, you know, any time you do anything when you're in different countries, you have to always leave a half a second after what you say.
You always have to, and it's very, very difficult to do.
And that's when it messes up.
When people are like, oh, no, you know what?
The thing about me is I'm a maverick.
I'm going to say what I want.
And they're not telling you to give them your script because they're censoring you.
They're saying it looks really, really eggy when we're talking over each other.
Yeah.
The only award ceremony where this doesn't really happen or where it actually is not excruciating is at the Oscars because it's the only award ceremony where the presenters rehearse.
And it makes such a difference for people coming on thinking, I guess I'm just going to open an envelope and just bring the magic of me to this moment.
Please don't bring the magic of you.
Please let us know exactly what you're saying.
It works so much better.
Can I ask this as a final question,
please?
Absolutely love it.
By the way, thank you so much to Martin and Martin.
Martin's are hugely grateful.
So great.
And also when we're all watching this on Saturday, let's say a prayer for the two of them and recognise the seven weeks of work that they put in and however much fun we're doing.
In the venue.
Yes,
in the venue.
In the venue, of course, all year round for everything else.
But this is a question from Ben.
Ben, I'm going to forgive you not giving us a surname because it's a great question.
I heard that somehow the Holy See, the central governing body of the Catholic Church and the Vatican City, could have an entry into Eurovision, but as yet has not.
Could you please verify this?
And what would you like their entry to be?
So, could the Vatican City enter Eurovision?
Oh, God, it's a great card to have held back.
Yeah.
You can participate in Eurovision if you are a member of the EBU.
Now, my understanding is that it's Vatican Radio, the oft-listened to Vatican Radio that is a member of the EBU.
So I think technically, quite a stretch technically, they might be able to enter an act.
And frankly, a lineup of dancing cardinals,
I'm all for.
Me too.
I think that could do really well.
You know, song choice.
Yeah, you know, let's cross our fingers.
It would be a moment, right?
I think it's a testament to the madness of the ceremony that that would only be like the 90th maddest thing that had ever happened at Eurovision.
It would be like, oh, again, line dancing cardinals.
You can tell the emails that come into those guys' inboxes every day that they hear a question like that.
They're going, yeah, could we do it?
Yeah, it's Vatican Radio, I guess.
So, yeah, it's doable.
Yeah, we can do it.
They've heard madder questions all the time.
I would love the Vatican City.
Just a series of popes.
As I say, it's in the back pocket.
That is a card yet to play.
They've played quite a lot of cards in their time in the Vatican, but this is something they haven't yet done.
It is worth it.
There'll be a cardinal somewhere who lives in the Vatican City who has a musical background for sure.
Oh, yeah.
And it'll be a bit of fun.
I think
at least someone with a mild ego, potentially, there might be someone in that particular group of 700 odd people.
But also, you get the Catholic vote in lots of different countries.
You might do well.
You might get through the semi-finals.
But I love that you're already onto the zephology of it all.
Yes, you're right.
Actually, you could do.
I'm trying to think of the demographics.
I mean, you'd hope for if the scale of it was widened out.
If I was like Chesney Hawks or something, let's not rule that out.
If I was, why not go into a seminary now,
just really play the long game, and just go, I'm going to become a cardinal and then I'm going to win the Eurovision Song Contest.
As so often, you've given me some enormous food for thought there.
Something to think about.
Certainly something to think about.
Now that we are friends with Martin and Martin, I might send that and say, how would that work for you?
Would you disqualify him?
It's not for them to decide whether you're a fake cardinal or not.
Does Chesney Horts have to become a cardinal?
Or can he just become some sort of a monk who's seconded to Vatican City?
Yeah, or like
which happens.
But would that count as a ringer?
No, because you can be from any country and represent any country, can't you?
The writers are often from different countries.
The performers are often from different countries.
You know, like you get people like South London guys who go out and play for Guyana in the World Cup and stuff like that, go and play for St.
Kitts and Nevis because of their grandparents.
You know, that idea that you could be a ringer and just go and live in the Vatican City and then win Eurovision.
You have to be approved by top brass at the Vatican.
I'm vaguely aware it's been in the news recently.
I think you'd have to get the approval.
That's the difficulty.
They always want a ringer playing for St.
Kitts and Nevis or whatever, but
it's just whether they want to be represented at Europe.
I think the time will come.
Well, you've got an American Pope now.
I think so.
Oh, anything can happen now.
Anything can happen.
Well, hopefully, anything can and will happen on Saturday night.
Thank you so much to the Team Martins for doing that.
That was absolutely super.
I can't wait for next year now because I want to hear from them again.
Yeah, me too.
And I'm sure we might be discussing that next Tuesday.
We'll have to see.
Thank you, Martin and Martin.
Thank you for all your questions as well.
And we'll see everyone next Tuesday, I guess.
See you next Tuesday.
Well, that brings us to the end of another episode of The Wrestlers Entertainment, brought to you by our friends at Skype.
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