Saturday 24 May 2008

eurovision, yay!
singing dancing pirates and
we came last again.

The Wise Woman of Wigan and The Ugly One’s cousin Carol came over for Eurovision. We had a sweepstake, in which I picked out Bosnia, Israel, Latvia, France and two other countries we’d best just forget.
The Bosnians let me down straightaway, and then the Israeli entry, although written by Dana International and performed by a very cute man, was, well... dull!
I was hoping the Latvians might come through for me, but was laughed off the sofa when they appeared, all beardy-johnny-deppy-swashbuckley naff, singing a hi-ho-hi-ho shanty about ‘The Wolves of The Sea’.
Nul Points!
Although I’ve had my differences with France they were my last hope. Oh, cruel fate! The French entry looked like a Nineteen Seventies Schools Programming Science presenter, rode in on a golf cart and sang a maudlin song in English about how he loves ‘The Chivers’.
We all looked at each other blankly.
‘What are Chivers?’
‘Don’t look at me!’
‘It must be a French thing.’
‘Maybe he means ‘chives’’
Maybe he did. I was past caring. We all rang up and voted for the Finnish heavy metal band, not as heavy as Lordi, the Death metal orcs from a couple of years ago, but heavy enough.
As has become tediously typical, block voting ensued, and the Baltic Countries voted for each other, the Scandinavian countries for each other, Cyprus voted for Greece, and Greece would have voted for Cyrpus but Cyprus had been knocked out for being crap earlier in the week. The only people who voted for the UK were Ireland and San Marino (which as far as I know is a coffee shop in Brixton. Who’d have guessed it was an independent state with musicians and voting rights?)
A surprisingly large number of people voted for Greece, which none of us could understand, as we’d all scored them poorly on song, look and performance, but the winner was Russia, a pretty boy in a white shirt who warbled plaintively while a man in tights skated about on a coffee-table sized rink.
I shall write in and suggest that in future all countries ending in –ia or –va must club together and submit one song between them.