The spangled insanity, the stubborn reinforcement of crude national stereotypes, the scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship and hatred... throughout those long post-ABBA decades, the Eurovision Song Contest has been drawing 450 million of us to the sofa for all the wrong reasons. And the most gloriously wrong of all: our enduring fascination with the unfortunates left to wander the desolate summit of Mount Fiasco without a point to their names.

From Lisbon to Liverpool, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Tim Moore travels the continent to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who suffered the entertainment world's prime humiliation.