"Perhaps the most widely celebrated object of ridicule was the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual television competition first broadcast in 1970. A commercial exercise glossed as a celebration of the new technology of simultaneous television transmission to multiple countries, the show claimed hundreds of millions of spectators by the mid-70s. The Eurovision Song Contest, in which B-League crooners and unknowns from across the continent performed generic and forgettable material, before returning in almost every case to the obscurity whence they had briefly emerged, was so stunningly banal in conception and execution as to defy parody. It would have been out of date fifteen years earlier, but for just that reason, it heralded something new. The enthusiasm with which the Eurovision Song Contest promoted and celebrated a hopelessly dated format and a stream of inept performers reflected a growing culture of nostalgia, at once wistful and disabused. If punk, postmodern and parody were one response to the confusions of a disillusioned decade, retro was another."