Details

Made for Thinking Digital 2009, this page abuses Hans Rosling's wonderful Gapminder to produce graphs of a much more trivial kind - the Eurovision Song Contest.

Along the x-axis: the number of entries a country has had to the contest - so the more experienced a country is, the farther to the right it will be.

Along the y-axis: a five-year rolling average of their place from first to last, adjusted to allow for the differing number of contries in the final each year.

"Western Europe", the traditional Eurovision countries, are in red; the new Baltic and Balkan countries are in deep blue and green.

Of note:

• Press the Play button to watch the full animation.
• Track the United Kingdom and note that the televote came in during the late 90s and early 2000s... and what happened after 2002.
• Have a look at Ireland in the late 1990s.

• Email comments!