Euro(Eastern)vision
Well, last night we had the Eurovision semi-final, eagerly awaited, as you can probably imagine. The four of us had just finished dinner (pork fillet, cooked with rhubarb, sage and garlic, accompanied by roast potatoes and green beans) when the show started. We were well prepared with BBC scorecards, on which we could (but did not) score separately the song, the performance, the dance routine and the outfit, for the 28 cuntries taking part.
The Netherlands was there with Edsilia's On Top of teh World, as well as our Serbian lass Marija Serifovic (although I was the only one who had heard it before).
The night started off well, with teh first 15 secondsof Bulgaria but soon took a turn for the worse, the Bulgarian song very quickly losing its way. It all sounded very flat and uninspiring until we got to Edsilia in 10th place, where she put on what we thought was a good performance without it really delivering that killer punch. I would have liked more close-ups of her looking into the camera.
There were a couple of very bad performances from Albania and Poland, the worst of the night, before we got to Serbia. Time for everyone to be quiet and turn the volume up and, sure enough, our Marija delivered the performance of the night to get top points from all four of us! The backing singers had swapped their workman's clothes for Dolce & Gabbana suits, which was a pleasant bonus, whilst Marija herself surprised me by wearing her dark rimmed glasses, a pity because we could have had some more eye contact with her otherwise.
Anyway, there were another thirteen songs ot go., with pleasant surprises from Hungary (which qualified), Estonia (who didn't) and Sloveia (who did). Turkey, on teh other hand was atrocious but qualified, no doubt thanks to th ex-pat vote.
The big disappointment and great controversy of the night was the fact that every one of the ten qualifiers came from Eastern Europe (and Turkey and Georgia). No place for Edsilia or any of the other more Western European countries, of which maybe the ones with the better chances were Cyprus, Denmark and Austria. It seemed bad at the time, but writing about it now, it must be said that the Western European nations didn't really have such strong entries after all, and there were plenty of bad Eastern European songs which did not go through.
Still, it does seem that unless something changes in teh voting system, countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal (those countries without a large number of 'friendly' neighbours will never be able to make it to the final. I would not be surprised if one or two of them pull out in years ahead.
Serbia has now fallen back to thrid favourite behind the aluminium foil crazy people Ukraine and James Bod type Belarus (yuk!) Not so bad, I still think she can do it!
It is raining today, as it was yesterday evening and all night last night.
posted by Charles Roffey and Fred O at 14:36
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