Did anyone notice we had an election? If you voted you will no doubt have been disappointed. Tory supporters didn’t get the clear mandate they wanted. Labour did better than some expected, but still got pushed out of Downing Street. The Lib Dems think they’ve done quite well by getting a few cabinet seats, but I suspect that in a few years’ time we’ll see that as a mistake and they’ll become even more obscure than they were before the election.

Nobody else really figured on the electoral radar, apart from the Greens who did a fantastic job of bagging a seat down in Brighton. The first of many, I hope.

The biggest winners, then, seem to have been the broadcasters, who have been camped out on the green outside Parliament for the last two weeks.

The BBC, as ever, is putting on the biggest show as it seems to have moved half of White City to Westminster and boxed it up in a big black spaceship. Sky, on the other hand, is having a little garden party and has cracked open the gazebo. ITV, too.

Kay Burley, from Dancing on Ice, interviews Ken Clarke, Secretary of State for Justice

The ITV gazebo (left) and the BBC’s glossy black spaceship (right)

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Now the guy who sings for Switzerland does remind me a bit of Glenda Jackson. This is his third association with Eurovision. He came fifth in the German national finals in 1999 and was on the Swiss jury last year. This year he’s singing Il Pleut de L’Or, in French.

A very strange lyrical concept from Armenia, which likens everything to apricot stones. Nonetheless a great performance from an accomplished artist. Deserves to do well.

Moldova‘s entry is very different to last year’s low-tech song. It’s far less folky-traditional and the video has had quite a bit of money spent on it, rather than being filmed in what looked like a school sports hall. A great up-tempo dancy number.

Ignore the mangled grammar in Latvia‘s entry. It’s a brilliant song and the performance is first rate. How do you cry and sing at the same time like that? Subtle and underplayed.

And finally Serbia whose song this year is just so funny. Stick with it despite the slightly jerky beginning. It’ll have you singing oompa oompa stick it up your joompa by the end.

Eurovision 2010 is on at these times:

First Semi Final: Tuesday 25 May at 21h CET
Second Semi Final: Thursday 27 May at 21h CET
Final: Saturday 29 May at 21h CET

In the UK they are all on at 8pm. The semis are on BBC3 and the final is on BBC1.

In the meantime, if you want to order the album, Amazon has it on pre-order for £14.99 right now.

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Starting with my tip for the top, I reckon Denmark could be a winner. It will be up fourth up in the second semi-final, on Thursday 27 May. Nothing fancy – just good singing and a strong ending that should appeal to anyone who is more interested in the songs than the acrobatics.

Blugaria is a bit of an odd-ball. I think it will suffer from not having a defined ending, but the video is great and the chorus is so simple than anyone can sing it, which is quite important in a Eurovision song. It also mixes electronica and classical, which often does well, and in parts is somewhat reminiscent of Pall Oskar’s Icelandic entry from 2007. So it’s got pretty much all the bases covered.

Albania has a very Goldfrapp A&E video, not that that will count for much on the night. It reminds me a lot of Let’s Get Happy by Lou, who sang for Germany is 2003.

Spain has a guaranteed slot in the final, along with the UK, France, Germany and last year’s winner, Norway. So it doesn’t really need to try, but nonetheless it’s come out with this great circus-themed entry. Love it, plus a great performer whose experience of stage work really pays off.

And finally for today we have Iceland. Iceland often does a great song and last year came a very well-deserved second with a haunting ballad. This year it’s returned to more traditional dancy stuff this entry that deserves to do very well indeed – assuming the performer isn’t grounded by another ash cloud.

That’s the first half of my top ten songs for this year’s contest. Check back tomorrow for the rest.

And if you want to order the album, Amazon has it on pre-order for £14.99 right now.

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It’s taken us almost three years (certainly more than two) but we’ve got to the very end of Allo Allo. All nine series and 85 episodes. I didn’t think I’d be saying this when we were sitting through its nadir around the end of series five, but now I’m actually quite sad to see it go.

Admittedly it went on longer than it should, running for longer than the actual war during which it was set. It first aired on 30 December 1982 and finished almost exactly ten years later on 14 December 1992. There was a best-of in 1994 and a terrible ‘Return of’ programme in April 2007, but I don’t think you can count them as part of the actual series.

So what does happen when you get to the very, very end? Inevitably, what follows contains spoilers.

The British and Americans are advancing on Nouvion and the German forces fleeing the town. Herr Flick has plastic surgery to change his appearance and then he and Von Smallhausen try to escape to South America in a bathtub submarine. The plastic surgery storyline was a bit of a fudge to explain the fact that Richard Gibson had left at the end of series eight, and to be fair they pulled it off pretty well because David Janson, his replacement, was so good at mimicking him.

The Germans are thrown in the local jail until the terms of their surrender can be finalised, and then we skip ahead several years. Rene is in a wheelchair and his son has taken over the bar. Mme Edith is more or less bed-bound, as her mother was before her, and Gruber, without his little tank, is now an international art dealer. He is also, bizarrely, married to Helga, despite his amorous pursuit of Rene throughout the war.

The final scene is set in the square outside the cafe. The aged characters are admiring a statue of Rene that has been erected in the square to celebrate his work for the resistance. They manage to snap off one of its hollow arms and, as it drops off, out falls the lost picture of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies.

Finally rich, Rene jumps in the car with Yvette and they elope – something he had been promising and failing to do through the whole of the previous nine series.

It was a neat tying off, but we did get the feeling watching the last two series that they were only commissioned for the sake of completing the storyline. That aside, it’s a pretty impressive achievement.

It is cheesy in parts, but that’s half the fun of it, and I think over the course of 85 episodes you have to make some allowance for that, don’t you?

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[Via]

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An opportunity missed.

Perhaps I’ll subscribe to Challenge.

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The demands of complying with the Freedom of Information Act have cost the BBC more than £3m since the act was introduced in 2005, according to figures obtained through an FOI request by the Guardian.

Source: Guardian

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Here’s a headline:

£350,000. Tsk tsk tsk. That’s 2,456 licence fees gone on expenses.

Why isn’t it more?

It sounds like a lot, but that £350K was run up by ten board members. An average of £35,000 each.

Over five years. So an average of £7,000 per person per year.

To run the BBC – a job that involved international travel, late nights, wooing suppliers, customers and talent, researching, entertaining and providing five national television networks, ten national radio networks, the World Service (radio and TV), 40 local radio stations and countless web sites.

They should really be congratulated for keeping things under such tight control.

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We all knew that Norway was going to win it – we said that when we first heard the song four months ago, before he’d even won his place in the semis and the country was still dithering over whether or not to pick him. On the night, though, we actually put the Ukraine slightly ahead of him, but Europe had them miles apart, with Norway storming home with five times the number of points the Ukraine garnered. Shame.

I’m so glad Iceland came second. It was a great song brilliantly sung and I wouldn’t have been sad to see it win.

Of the above points, ours are out of a possible total of 130 for each act, and the actual points are out of a possible total of 504.

We spent it at Mark’s, as we do every year – 13 of us crammed into one room to score and sing along. His poor neighbours. It’s only a terrace. After that, the night slipped into watching old TV, embarrassing Bill with old clips of him presenting That’s Life in his green velour suit, and putting on the 2006 preview DVDs, which are always good for a sing-along.

The only slight downer was the exhaust falling off the car on the way back, still a long way from home. We had no choice but to carry on, with it dragging on the floor, scattering little orange sparks like a shuttle on re-entry all the way back, with every car that passed slowing down to point out what we already knew.

Quite hoarse on Sunday morning.

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Local media reports say $42 million is being spent on the 54th year of the competition… Moscow is using 30 per cent of the world’s entire stock of LED screens on its lavish stage, said a spokeswoman for the Swiss-based European Broadcasting Union (EBU), an association of broadcasters from 56 countries which runs the contest.

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