Eurovision

[caramel_betty]

I believe I'm possibly the only person on the Internet who doesn't give a shit about this year's Eurovision. We lost. It's not some massive global conspiracy. We lose when we put up bad songs with bad performers who perform badly on the night. Remember Gemini? Hopefully not.

• Other countries put up good, well-known, well-liked performers. I

Comments

[strongtrousers]

I entirely agree with regard to the UK's performance, and for that matter Ireland's (possibly the worst song Eurovision's ever had).

However, when what in my opinion was the best of the Europop entries, Malta, don't get through to the final, you have to start wondering. Remember Malta's 12-point protest vote for us last year?

I'm also irritated by Wogan's condemnation of the Bosnian entry. My thought was that it was nice to see something a bit unusual and quirky, and light-hearted without taking the piss too much, doing well. The same probably applies to the Latvian pirates.

What price someone we've heard of turning out for us next year? Wishful thinking.

[caramel_betty]

I think the reason people are annoyed is they think the song this year was good, and that he performed it well.

These people are insane.

[caramel_betty]

Given that the points only go to a subset of the countries, anyone who isn't solid top 5-10 material is going to (potentially) face problems scraping together many points. At that point, politics may play a role in seeing which countries let us scrape into the bottom couple of places for points, or whether they let someone else in instead. Basically, if every country in Europe thought that our song was worthy of being 15th overall (instead of last), we'd come last because there are no points for 15th place.

You have to be playing the game so that some countries like you - it doesn't matter if that makes you drop from 15th to 20th in another country, if you go from 15th to 5th in others. This is why, politics aside, many countries vote for each other - they have similar cultures, and large numbers of ex-pats and second generation families there, and so on. There aren't many countries in Europe that England has a shared culture like that with.

[brixtonbrood]

I kind of agree - there's definitely a strong correlation between points and either song quality, or fame (I thought Russia's song sucked, but his personal fame helped a lot - ditto Bulgaria's bizarre 12 points for Germany (this year's Jemini) and most of the rest of the top ten were pretty good).

However I disagree about Love City Groove, who I liked, and who scored pretty well as I recall.

Also, I think there is room to take the piss, and not take it too seriously - look at Lordi and Azerbaijan and Bosnia and Latvia's pirates this year all of whom scored heavily - but the key is to take the piss in a way that is accessible to people who don't share your national culture and language. Dustin the Turkey, and Scooch and Spain were all arguably funny but only to people who got the references, and they suffered the consequences.

Also also, sending a bona fide pop star is not necessarily the answer - France sent a real pop star, singing a great song written and produced by other real pop stars, and it didn't get them very far.

[caramel_betty]

Having an act that's fun and enjoys itself is somewhat different to having an act that actively just takes the piss. By not taking it seriously, I mean we're on the "takes the piss" side of Eurovision. In a number of cases, you can tell (from interviews etc.) that the performers are bricking themselves thinking "Oh well, end of career beckoning" - which simply isn't the case in many other parts of Europe, or in the UK in the past.

Of course, it's entirely possible that if we sent a great pop star (or group) with a good track record, a great song, and an extreme performance, we might get burned by political voting. At that point, it would be potentially useful to complain. When we send Scooch and a guy who might as well have been removed from the face of the planet for the last three years and say "Oh noes, we came last!", we're not in a position to throw stones.

Maybe we should get Amy Winehouse to do it next year, then?

[juggzy]

"I don't want to go to Rekjavic, oh no, no, no."

[oldbloke]

It's be FASCINATING to see what happened if the voters didn't know where the songs were from. However I can't think of any way of arranging this, since the songs have to be prepared in advance and so the data is out there.