In response to Austrian “bearded lady” Conchita Wurst winning this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, Russia are reviving the alternative Intervision Song Contest after a 34 year hiatus.

The revival of the Intervision, which first ran from 1977 to 1980, will see the six member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) compete against eachother in the same format as the Eurovision Song Contest. The countries taking part include China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and it will take place this October.

Although president Vladimir Putin first proposed reviving the contest in 2009, the decision comes after Valery Rashkin of the Communist Party complained that “[Conchita’s win] exhausted our patience… We must leave this competition. We cannot tolerate this endless madness.” 

MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky added that Conchita’s win heralded “the end of Europe.”

At the time of the original broadcast of the contest in 1977, home telephones in Soviet countries were a rarity. Instead of calling in your vote, viewers would turn on their house lights if they liked a song and switch them off if not if they did not. Officials would calculate votes by monitoring spikes on country’s power grid.