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What a great contest. Admittedly it went in waves, starting out quite slow and dull, but the middle section was fantastic, with some really different songs that broke the Eurovision mold once and for all. The fact that the winners were Lordi, a metal band dressed as some creatures from a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, helped no end, as it’s broken the stereotypical cheesy, teenybop image entirely.

The UK came in a miserable 19th out of 24, which wasn’t entirely surprising, and in fairness was pretty much where we deserved to be. Naff song, naff concept, naff singer. To give Daz and the school girls their due, they did perform it quite well, but it was doomed from the start when stood beside Romania’s fantastic although close to incomprehensible song about a man having an affair, Russia’s woman-spawning piano or the man from Albania who was all bit strangled by his braces.

Germany should have scored better than it did, having bravely entered a country song, and Lithuania should have scored more poorly than it did with their abysmal We Are The Winners. Coming immediately before the UK it probably helped boost our score, although if that’s the case we should probably have scored nothing for the second year in three.

France was the big loser of the night. It scored just five points, beating only Malta (1) and Israel (4). Like Britain, Germany and Spain, though, it doesn’t need to come in the top ten to qualify for next year’s contest: we plough so much money into the EBU that we’re guaranteed a spot, so can afford to enter the kind of rubbish we do. It’s like a musical version of the UN Security Council, and should really be disbanded.

As usual, we watched it at Mark’s annual Eurovision Party, taking around food to represent each country. I submitted Spanish strawberries, Mediterranean crackers and, having had the same idea as someone else, Swiss Roll. Nobody really bought anything particularly sensible, so it was a night of key lime pie, banoffee pie, crisps and sweets. It’s as well it happens only once a year.

Our voting came pretty close to matching the leaderboard, as we put Finland at the top and France at the bottom, but Denmark was in our top five but polled 18th in real life, while we had Lithuania in the bottom five and it actually rolled home sixth.

Next year’s contest will be an interesting one. Each one is influenced by the winner of the previous year. Might Eurovision 2007 be a three-hour horror rock fest?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 20th, 2006 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Europe, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.