You don’t boo our ally Dima Bilan

The BBC has admitted it removed scenes of Russia being booed over anti-gay laws from the broadcast of Eurovision’s Greatest Hits Pink News reports today,

The start of the singer’s performance was met with loud booing from the crowd at the Hammersmith Apollo show – in protest of Russia’s continuing ban on ‘gay propaganda’.

However, the scenes were entirely removed from the broadcast version – with the singer’s medley of tracks ‘Believe’ and ‘Never Let You Go’ also featuring a noticeable lack of close-up shots of the audience, Pink News reported earlier today.

Dima Bilan – an ally

But in fact Bilan is an ally, he signed an open letter to President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 together with 300 celebrities, including leading pop stars.

The open letter included the following : “We are very concerned about the expanding campaign to present St. Petersburg as a capital of homophobia and obscurantism”.

“There was no other person in the history of St. Petersburg to have disgraced the city throughout the world in such a short period of time,” the letter said about the law’s author, Vitaly Milonov.

Signees include “king of Russian pop” Filipp Kirkorov; the winner of 2008 Eurovision contest in Moscow, Dima Bilan; Russian rock ‘n’ roll legend Valery Syutkin and opera crossover star Nikolai Baskov.

Read more at sputniknews.com

You don’t boo an ally even if the person is representing a country that has a leader like Vladimir Putin with his ‘gay propaganda’ paranoia.

Photo By Thomas Hanses (EBU)