| Eurovision Song Contest News - 2009 Moscow, Russia 

Greg Dunn

My first contact with the Eurovision Song Contest came, probably, at some time in the 1980s. It has been shown in Australia since before I was born, I think, but I only really got into it in the 1990s when my interest in languages and love of music dovetailed. When I moved to Europe - first to Italy and then, more than six years ago, to Estonia - I got all the more caught up with it, attending my first ESC in Stockholm in 2000.

After Estonia won in Copenhagen in 2001 I got in touch with some contacts at ETV and before I knew it I was working on the event every spare moment of the day (alongside my regular full-time job!), eventually to be credited as Supervising Producer or something on the event. It was a hectic time, but brilliant, and fascinating too watching how it's all put together. I had fingers in so many pies by the time the day of the show came round that I could barely count them all: I'd proofread and edited anything that had something to do with English (and that was just about everything); I'd rewritten the script; I'd worked with the artistic director to caption and decide on the order of the postcards; I'd worked and rehearsed with the hosts; and in the end I was working with both the press manager and the director himself, eventually sitting through the contest out in the director's OB van, wired into the machinery. It was an amazing experience.

My love of the contest certainly hasn't diminished since then, and I'm glad to see it so close to 'home' again in 2007.