Miss World 2006 Contestants Heads to Poland for the Pageant
Pageant contestants of Miss World 2006 contest from around the globe visit Warsaw, capital of Poland, those beauty queens arrived for a month of pageantry across the country ahead of the final of the Miss World 2006 pageant contest scheduled for Sep 30. They were divided into three groups to visit Warsaw on Saturday.
When Eric Morley founded Miss World in 1951, he might not have imagined that the pageant would one day attract a global audience of more than two billion. The audience rating for the Miss World final is now the third highest, next only to Olympic Games and the World Cup football matches.
With total of 30 million zlotys ($9.68 million) will be spent on preparations for the final and nearly 200 TV stations around the world will give live broadcasts of the pageant final night. Polish authorities hope the event would help boost the county’s tourism image overseas.
TVP, the Polish TV station, which was awarded the right to broadcast the final live, will be among the main beneficiaries, with its advertising income alone expected to reach 15 million zlotys ($4.84 million). The audience will vote through the audio communication system or short message service and the telecommunication operators are expected to harvest about 32 million zlotys (10.32 million U.S. dollars).
The Miss World contest is no stranger to controversy. It was established by British entertainment guru Eric Morley in 1951, as the Festival Bikini Contest, which had just been christened, but the newspapers of the day called it Miss World. Although planned as a single contest, the emergence of the Miss Universe pageant saw Mr Morley make it an annual event. Opposition to the wearing of bikinis led to more modest swimwear after the first contest and the pageant’s popularity grew as the popularity of television grew.
The first winner from the United States, 1973′s Marjorie Wallace, was forced to resign because of her high-profile serial dating. The 1974 winner Helen Morgan resigned four days later after it was discovered she was a single mother. In 1976, several countries went on a boycott, because the pageant included both a Caucasian and African representative for South Africa.
The 1980 winner Gabriela Brum of Germany resigned one day after winning, initially claiming her boyfriend disapproved. A few days later it emerged that she had been forced to resign after it was discovered that she posed naked for a magazine. In the 1980s, the pageant repositioned itself with the slogan Beauty With a Purpose. The contest added tests of intelligence and personality. By the 1990s, the pageant was reaching two billion viewers from almost every country in the world.
This year Miss World pageant controversy begun with the the Nude Miss World Mermaid Poster which had her chest covered on posters promoting the competition after the original version was judged too erotic.
“The way the artist drew it first, one of her breasts was covered and one wasn’t,” said Tadeusz Deszkiewicz, director of Warsaw’s promotion bureau. “The combination was very erotic.”
Short URL: http://www.womendiary.net/?p=581
Posted by woman
on Sep 3 2006. Filed under Women Fashion, Women Lifestyle.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
