Attending Eurovision as an Australian requires a certain degree of vigilance and perseverance. First of all, you have to find out when tickets will be on sale, then you have to work out how you can buy them.
But there is much more to Eurovision than tickets! There are the fan clubs. All of the official Eurovision fan clubs are part of the OGAE Network. We first heard of this by accident, when a contact on social media suggested we join.
If you live in Europe, this is a simple matter of joining your national club. However, if you are an Australian, you come under the category of ‘Rest of the World’ – fortunately, there is an OGAE with that name, so you don’t miss out!
Joining OGAE Rest of the World is a simple matter of e-mailing the club president in South Africa, who then forwards your details to the club secretary in Azerbaijan for the cards to be produced in Finland. Then you go to the Eurovision Fan Cafe in Malmö to pick up your card from an unmarked desk in the foyer where you pay cash for the final result. Yes, our cards were actually there to be collected. However, our photos and names had been swapped, which is a little disconcerting as we are of differing gender.
After sending our details to OGAE, we then received an email about submitting our information to apply for yet another limited edition fan pass with benefits including access to exclusive clubs and free public transport around Skåne County in Sweden. These would certainly be worthwhile, so while the email didn’t look particularly official, it also didn’t ask for credit card or bank details, first born children or the like, so we figured that we would give it a go. Days before we left, we received an email confirming that we had passes and giving the details on how to collect them. These had to be collected once we had our OGAE passes, from the accreditation centre at the arena. So off we headed to collect our passes. These are formal accreditation cards like those worn by the press, staff etc, but with a designation for fans, so you feel really special wearing one. (Although the OGAE had again swapped our photos, so we had new pictures taken for the accreditation.)Yes, it’s official, I’m an accredited Eurovision fan!
Thinking we had the fan thing all sorted, we ran into an Australian at the Semi Final who then told us about a Facebook page for Australians at Eurovision that organised events, but which we hadn’t managed to hear about from any of our other contacts. Just when we thought we had all bases covered! The Eurovision fan world is bigger and far more complicated than you may expect!