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Well, what can I say except we got what we deserved. It’s half two - I’ve just got in from Mark’s Eurovision party where we watched the United Kingdom being comprehensively trounced by every other nation in Europe and ending up with the dreaded nul points.

It’s our worst performance to date. Prior to tonight it was in 2000 when we came 16th. Considering there were 26 countries taking part this time around, though, and the previous record was 24, it means that technically we have done worse than any other country ever in the whole history of the contest.

It’s not that we have a bad song. Admittedly it wasn’t the best, but there were far worse. The problem lay in the off-key performance that clearly showed the nerves of the performers.

In short we have no-one to blame but ourselves.

As for Turkey winning - where did that come from? A very bizarre result, but an exciting end to the contest where it could have gone one of three ways right up until the last jury cast its votes, and one of two ways right up until the very last vote.

By the time it was over, and we’d watched a video of the 1974 contest (when Abba won), listened to a CD of the 1980 contest and then gone through every Dutch entry from 1958 to the present day we’d all been slouched in sagging armchairs for six and a half hours, stuffing ourselves with the pan-European dishes we’d brought along. I’m not sure the Vienetta I’d provided to represent the Austrian entry really counted (even though Vienetta does sound a bit like Vienna), but then it’s traditional for the person representing Malta to bring along Malteesers, so some lattitude is clearly permissible.

It was pretty much the same crowd as last year. Mark and Vince, Mark and Ja, Bill Buckley, Alison, Daniel the Spaniel and Justin Juice, with Bill taking care of our scoring. We’d actually put Greece at the head of the pack by the time we’d totted everything up, and correctly predicted that the UK would come last.

We did the keychange count, too - 17 changes in 26 songs (and three of them were in just one entry) so well down on previous years. Clearly the Eurovision is going through changes on more than just one front.

It was a great night, though, with good friends and lots of noise. We cheered and clapped every entry, cheered and clapped every key change, cheered and clapped every vote-giver and cheered and clapped every time it got more and more obvious that the UK was going to be the only country with nul points by the end of it. The music was so loud you could probably hear it at the end of the street and when we left we were all happy and tired and had ringing in our ears.

Here’s to next year, and Ankara.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2003 at 2:38 am and is filed under Europe. 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.