The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) offers a unique viewpoint to
the ways Europe has been imagined on television from the 1950s to the
present. This paper looks at the use of a key visual symbol for Europe,
the European map, to outline the history of the ESC’s representation of
Europe. Whilst the European map was rarely used during the first decades
of the ESC, it became a central visual element of the show in the
1990s, a period of great political change in Europe. Since then, the ESC
maps have pictured an ever widening image of Europe, gradually moving
towards a dynamic, moving image of Europe and finally, dispensing with a
coherent map of Europe altogether.