A hilariously funny book about the Eurovision Song Contest.Fifty years after Jetty Paerl took to the Lugano stage and burst into “The Birds of Holland,” the Eurovision Song Contest is still luring 450 million Europeans to the sofa on a Saturday night in May every year. But where once they settled down to admire the “top-quality original songwriting” that the contest was inaugurated to showcase, the Eurovision Song Contest, throughout the post-Abba decades, has come to mean “entertainment” for all the wrong reasons: magnificent foolishness and stubborn reinforcement of the crudest national stereotypes, and a scoreboard shamelessly corrupted by cross-border friendship and hatred.And as post-modern connoisseurs of showbiz meltdown, the audience has shifted its focus from the blandly competent winners to the spangled, hapless losers. It is here that the gold standard of farcical failure, the benchmark of badness, is to score NUL POINTS, and where sympathetic understanding is replaced by brutal guffaws.Darkly fascinated with those whose lives are shadowed by the entertainment world’s most grandiose humiliation, Tim Moore sets off to track down the thirteen Eurominstrels who have come and gone without troubling the scorers. From Lisbon to Lithuania, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Moore travels the continent to hear their stories — “poignant, ludicrous and heartwarming in equal measure” — recounting as he does so the history of that towering cathedral of cheese, the Eurovision Song Contest itself.

Nul Points

Humor & Entertainment

Moore, Tim

Humor

Vintage Books

An odyssey through 2,000 years of filth and fury where the nights were black, the world was your outside toilet and everything tasted faintly of leeks.In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, and shamed into confessing the phobic haste with which he demolished this facility, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the horny-handed hardships and homespun pleasures enjoyed and endured by Moores gone by.The journey takes him into the world of historical re-enactment, sitting at the bare and grubby feet of retromaniacs who have seen their future in the past. Living on bramble leaves, Johnny cake and porridge, Moore travels from the Iron Age to the Steam Age. He shares straw beds and daft hats with period obsessives driven by socio-historical curiosity, disillusionment with the pampered fecklessness of the modern world, or a simple nostalgia for campfires, flatulence and brutality.Along the way he meets living historians for whom authenticity means pulling their own teeth out, and those who stride back through time with a Nokia and a packet of fags stuffed down their codpiece.

I Believe in Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

History

A hilarious account of an odyssey across 'unloved Britain'. It began with an accidental daytrip to an intriguingly awful resort on the Thames Estuary, and ended 3,812 miles later: one man's journey through deep-fried, brownfield, poundshop Britain, a crash course in urban blight, deranged civic planning and commercial eccentricity. Following an itinerary drawn up from surveys, polls, reviews and lazy personal prejudice, Tim Moore goes to all the places that nobody wants to go to -- the bleakest towns, the shonkiest hotels, the scariest pubs, the silliest sea zoos. He visits the grid reference adjudged by the Ordnance Survey to be the least interesting point in Britain, and is chased out of the new town twice crowned Scotland's Most Dismal Place. His palate is flayed alive by horrific regional foodstuffs, his ears shrivelled by the 358 least loved tracks in the history of native popular music. With his progress entrusted to our motor industry's fittingly hopeless finale, he comes to learn that Britain seems very much larger when you're driving around it in a Bulgarian-built Austin Maestro. Yet as the soggy, decrepit quest unfolds, so it evolves into something much more stirring: a nostalgic celebration of our magnificent mercantile pomp, and an angry requiem for a golden age of cheerily homespun crap culture being swept aside by the faceless, soul-stripping forces of Tesco-town globalisation.

You are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain

Seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting event in the world, and determined to tackle the most fearsome physical challenge outside classical mythology, Moore, the ultimate amateur, attempts to complete all 3,630km of the 2000 Tour in the weeks before the professionals set off.      Battling it out with the old men on butchers' bikes across the plains of Aquitaine and pursued by cattle over Europe's second highest road, Moore soon finds himself resorting to narcotic assistance, systematic overeating and waxed legs before summoning a support vehicle staffed by cruelly sceptical family and friends. Accounts of his suffering and chicanery, and those encountered in the race's epic history, are interwoven through a look at rural France busy tarting itself up for those 15 seconds of fame as the Tour careers through at 50kph. An heroic depiction of an inadequate man's attempt to achieve the unachievable, Moore's Tour is a tale of calorific excess, ludicrous clothing and intimate discomfort.

FRENCH REVOLUTIONS

Sports & Outdoors

Individual Sports

RANDOM HOUSE UK

Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail. With a donkey. Being larger than a cat, the donkey falls into that category of animal that Tim Moore is at least slightly scared of. Yet, intrigued by epic accounts of a pilgrimage undertaken by one in three medieval Europeans, and strangely committed to historical authenticity, he finds himself leading a Pyrenean ass named Shinto into Spain, headed for Santiago de Compostela. Nuzzling businessmen at a city-centre zebra crossing, or shuffling after some policewomen across a broiled and lonely plain, the pair bring a smile to every local face. Over 500 miles of extreme weather, agonizing bestial sloth and triple-bunk dormitories, it becomes memorably apparent that for the multinational band of eccentrics who keep the Santiagan flame alive, the pilgrimage has evolved from a purely devotional undertaking into a mobile therapist’s couch. Ludicrous, heart-warming and improbably inspirational, Spanish Steps is the story of what happens when a rather silly man tries to walk all the way across a very large country, with a very large animal who doesn’t really want to.

Spanish Steps: One Man and His Ass on the Pilgrim Way to Santiago

Travel

Europe

JONATHAN CAPE.

Once a year, on a Saturday night in May, occurs a festival of kitsch inanity called the Eurovision Song Contest. Tim Moore is a rare comic talent and in Nul Points he both celebrates the contest (it’s one high point was Abba singing “Waterloo”), and its many low ones, (fourteen songs, over the years, received not one point from the scorers).

An odyssey through 2,000 years of filth and fury, where men were men, the nights were black, the world was your outside toilet and everything tasted faintly of leeks. In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, and shamed to confess the phobic haste with which he demolished this facility, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the horny-handed hardships and homespun pleasures enjoyed and endured by Moores gone by. The journey that follows takes him through the world of historical re-enactment, sitting at the bare and grubby feet of retromaniacs who have seen their future in the past, and learning their singular ways. Living on bramble leaves, Johnny cake and porridge, Moore travels from the Iron Age to the Steam Age. He shares straw beds and daft hats with period obsessives driven by socio-historical curiosity, disillusionment with the pampered fecklessness of the modern world, or a simple nostalgia for campfires, flatulence and brutality. Along the way he meets living historians for whom authenticity means pulling their own teeth out and dyeing outfits in urine, and those who stride back through time with a Nokia and a packet of fags stuffed down their codpiece.

I Believe In Yesterday: My Living Hell in Living History

A hilarious account of an odyssey across 'unloved Britain'.It began with an accidental daytrip to an intriguingly awful resort on the Thames Estuary, and ended 3,812 miles later: one man's journey through deep-fried, brownfield, poundshop Britain, a crash course in urban blight, deranged civic planning and commercial eccentricity. Following an itinerary drawn up from surveys, polls, reviews and lazy personal prejudice, Tim Moore goes to all the places that nobody wants to go to -- the bleakest towns, the shonkiest hotels, the scariest pubs, the silliest sea zoos. He visits the grid reference adjudged by the Ordnance Survey to be the least interesting point in Britain, and is chased out of the new town twice crowned Scotland's Most Dismal Place. His palate is flayed alive by horrific regional foodstuffs, his ears shrivelled by the 358 least loved tracks in the history of native popular music. With his progress entrusted to our motor industry's fittingly hopeless finale, he comes to learn that Britain seems very much larger when you're driving around it in a Bulgarian-built Austin Maestro. Yet as the soggy, decrepit quest unfolds, so it evolves into something much more stirring: a nostalgic celebration of our magnificent mercantile pomp, and an angry requiem for a golden age of cheerily homespun crap culture being swept aside by the faceless, soul-stripping forces of Tesco-town globalisation.

You are Awful (But I Like You: Travels Around Unloved Britain

The author of the bestselling French Revolutions does Italy -- cycling the course of the 1914 Giro d'Italia on a wooden bike. "Bill Bryson on two wheels." --Independent.      On the eve of the Giro d'Italia's 100th anniversary, Tim Moore sets out to cycle the route of the first race, all 3,162 km of it. On a 100-year-old bike. That he built himself.      The Giro is arguably the most brutal of the Grand Tours, and it began in style. At midnight on May 24, 1914 eighty-one starters were waved off by 10,000 spectators for this first circuit of Italy. Two weeks later, after enduring cataclysmic storms, roads strewn with nails, even the loss of an eye by one competitor, eight cyclists finished.      Tim hadn't done any significant cycling for twelve years, but taking on the 1914 Giro was a compelling challenge. To make it more authentic, he decided to do it on a 1914 bike, which, unburdened by relevant experience, he needed to assemble from a stack of rusty parts in a Breton farmer's barn.      Fuelled by Chianti, wearing period leather goggles and a woollen cycling shirt, and with the winner of the 1914 Giro's diary as his trusty companion, Tim sets off to tell the story of this historic race, as well as the travails of a middle-aged man cycling up a lot of mountains on a mainly wooden bicycle.

Gironimo!: Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy

Yellow Jersey Press

French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France

Seduced by the speed and glamour of the biggest annual sporting event in the world, and determined to tackle the most fearsome physical challenge outside classical mythology, Moore, the ultimate amateur, attempts to complete all 3,630km of the 2000 Tour in the weeks before the professionals set off. Battling it out with the old men on butchers' bikes across the plains of Aquitaine and pursued by cattle over Europe's second highest road, Moore soon finds himself resorting to narcotic assistance, systematic overeating and waxed legs before summoning a support vehicle staffed by cruelly sceptical family and friends. Accounts of his suffering and chicanery, and those encountered in the race's epic history, are interwoven through a look at rural France busy tarting itself up for those 15 seconds of fame as the Tour careers through at 50kph. An heroic depiction of an inadequate man's attempt to achieve the unachievable, Moore's Tour is a tale of calorific excess, ludicrous clothing and intimate discomfort.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moore, Tim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moore, Tim

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moore, Tim. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Nul Points

I Believe in Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History

You are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain

FRENCH REVOLUTIONS

Spanish Steps: One Man and His Ass on the Pilgrim Way to Santiago

Nul Points

I Believe In Yesterday: My Living Hell in Living History

You are Awful (But I Like You: Travels Around Unloved Britain

Gironimo!: Riding the Very Terrible 1914 Tour of Italy

French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France