DON’T EVER CHANGE, NEVER CHANGE [434]

The Isle of Man is part of the British Isles, but not part of the UK. It is a self-governing Crown Dependency, but the UK government is responsible for its defence and representing its interests abroad. The British monarch is the Isle of Man’s head of state, and their head appears on their currency, the value of the Manx pound being tied to the British Pound.

The Isle of Man government has said it will no longer produce their own 1p and 2p coins, as they cost more to produce than their face value. Businesses on the island have been asked to start rounding prices to the nearest 5p, in preparation for shortages of the lower value coins in the coming years.

This is old news to many people. Six countries that have the Euro as their currency have not used one- and two-cent coins since 2013, something I hardly noticed when I visited the Republic of Ireland in 2016. The policy there is also to round up the final amount to pay to the nearest five cents, a policy introduced in Sweden in 1972 when they began a similar process with the krona – the öre still exists as one hundredth of a krona, but the one-krona coin has been the smallest unit of physical currency since 2010.

The last item I bought for a penny was a few years ago, a second-hand book obtained through Amazon, although the cost of postage must have made up for any shortfall. I remember being able to buy penny sweets individually, but that was in the 1990s.

The time is now ticking on the practicality of the British penny, despite the protestations of coin collectors. My own coin collection exists mainly to have examples of old coins, like the old pre-decimal farthing, one quarter of a penny when 240 pennies made a pound, itself withdrawn in 1960. I also own three unopened rolls of decimal half-penny coins, withdrawn in 1984 when dividing a pound into more than a hundred units became useless. Few coin-operated payment machines in the UK now accept coins under 10p in value – by the way, one Swedish krona happens to be worth between seven and eight pence. I usually only carry coins in an emergency, anticipating if a car park is only accepting cash, or if a card payment machine in a shop is broken, otherwise only paying in coins to get rid of the weight received as change from using banknotes. I would be fine with the “shilling” being the lowest value British coin, as the five pence coin is smaller in size than a penny.

Coins don’t wear away that fast, so coin collectors will be fine for some time to come – this group is the reason I rarely see a fifty pence coin in my change, as they are usually issued these days as special editions. A new set of standard, “definitive” coins will be introduced by the Royal Mint, with a dormouse and red squirrel on the 1p and 2p respectively, so they will remain for some time yet. The penny could eventually become a commemorative coin, having been pure silver until the switch to copper in 1796, before bronze and copper-coated steel followed – this will allow the usually-commemorative crown coin, valued at £5, to finally replace the £5 note.

COULDN’T ESCAPE IF I WANTED TO [396]

Mae Muller performing "I Wrote a Song" for the UK

May 2023 has been a good time for politically charged camp spectacles held in the United Kingdom, the Coronation of King Charles III having been followed by a week of events for the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Liverpool on behalf of Ukraine after Russia’s war left them unable to host after winning last year. If the Prime Minister calls a General Election next week, I am going to explode.

Much like trying to follow the overnight results of a General Election, I have fallen asleep before the end of the last five Eurovision finals. Starting at the usual 8pm UK time, this year’s contest was scheduled to finish at midnight, which was 2am in Ukraine, or an hour past my natural power-down time. This has been a result of the gradual change in both the presentation and significance of the contest, and my sleeping habits not having changed in that time.

How did I do in 2023? It turns out that deciding to write an article about the programme you are watching requires you to remain alert, although I began flagging during the reading out of the scores, which will always be slower paced than everything that came before it. With the UK’s brilliant entry, Mae Muller’s “I Wrote a Song”, finishing second from last on the night, or 25th out of 37 overall, I finally called it a night at 12.05am, ten minutes before the end of the contest, and before Sweden’s entrant, Loreen, could reprise her winning song “Tattoo”. Whatever time it is planned to end, the Eurovision final is always destined to overrun by about fifteen minutes.

But that is hardly the point. With the theme of the contest being “United by Music”, with Ukrainian music and culture emphasised from the start, and culminating in the most effective performance of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” there has probably been, every part of the contest that has grown bigger since the UK last held it in 1998, from the opening flag-waving procession of entrants, through the use of video walls in the staging of each song, to the scale and length of the interval acts, and the ultimate gruelling wait to find out the public vote only gave the UK nine points (even if that was still four more than Spain), everything had a reason to be there.

The scale of the coverage given this year by the BBC, as host broadcaster, made the Eurovision Song Contest into a week-long event this time, from the opening ceremony in Liverpool the previous Sunday, the two semi-finals on the Tuesday and Thursday, and various programmes celebrating the music and history of the contest. The semi-final had been introduced in 2004, with a second added five years later, as broadcasters from more countries joined the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) during the 1990s. Australia’s love of the contest made them honorary Europeans to compete themselves from 2011, but Australia has been represented in the EBU since it was formed in 1950, alongside Canada and New Zealand. (“Active” and “Associate” membership of the EBU is determined using the “European Broadcasting Area” as defined by the International Telecommunications Union, for those who still ask why Israel competes each year.) 

Held in Birmingham, the 1998 contest still closely resembled how it began in 1956, a one-night event linking countries both through friendship, music and technology, with all twenty-five entrants singing in their home languages with the backing of an orchestra. Lower-scoring countries were still required to skip the following year to allow other countries the chance to compete at least every other year, a scheme introduced in 1993 to replace an off-air qualifying round. Pop music, very much mainstream in 1998, remained disseminated by TV, radio and physical sales of music, and “Top of the Pops” aired on BBC One the night before the contest, like it did every Friday night. It was primarily a song contest, and one the UK was always destined to take very seriously.

But changes were already underway: 1998 was the last year for both the language rule and the orchestra, and the first year where a public vote by telephone replaced scoring from professional juries, where the phone network of competing countries allowed – years of chopping and changing the scoring system has now arrived at the jury and phone/online votes being treated separately and weighted the same as each other. Furthermore, the choice of the National Indoor Arena cemented the contest’s move away from theatres to larger venues, from stalls to standing crowds.

I did start by saying Eurovision was a camp spectacle, the subtext of outrageousness and gaudiness in both the songs and their staging having now become both outright text and a major selling point of the contest. It is no surprise that the growing inclusivity of other countries and cultures would lead to the contest being adopted as a symbol of inclusivity. The backlashes and death threats against Israel’s transgender competitor in 1998, Dana International, and Austria’s drag queen entrant Conchita Wurst in 2014, are mostly forgotten because their songs went on to win the contest. Dana International’s song “Diva” becoming the first to win when (almost) all the people of Europe were given the chance to vote may prove to be the most poignant moment in the history of the contest.