greenlau

Did you all watch Eurovision over the weekend? I know, I know... silly question, because the answer is obviously "YES!" It's only one of the three greatest days of year and I had the pleasure this year to be surrounded by equally jubilant Eurovision loving people. Cheering and booing with each performance (or, in the case of Portugal, nobody even cared enough to shout abuse!) and gnashing our teeth as the results poured in. If you follow me on Twitter then you would have gotten my entire stream-of-conscious thoughts about the show ranging from the prevalence of wind machines, costume reveals, money notes, key changes AND pyrotechnics (occasionally all in the span of a few seconds) to my disappointment that Ruslana's "Wild Dances" can't represent Ukraine each and ever year.

I can't say I was a big fan of the winning entry from Germany, Lena's "Satellite", due to her propensity for weird vocal inflections (say hello to Paloma Faith and Gabriella Cilmi then), but she was miles better than second placing Turkey ("We Could be the Same" by maNga") or Belgium's John Mayer-lite (which says a lot) singer Tom Dice and his stupid "Me and My Guitar", which was getting so many big scores until they they, thankfully, only managed a sixth placing.

Watching these hosts was like watching an oddball combination of Juliette Binoche, Doogie Houser and Fuzzy Agolley that had somehow staggered their way to Oslo, Norway!
My absolute favourite of the evening was Romania's entrant, "Playing with Fire" by Paula Seling & Ovi, which managed to rally late in the game and place third. I was really hoping this track that was performed by some random dude and a Shania Twain lookalike in a catsuit on a duel perspex piano could win (there's even some popera in there for good measure), but Germany just stormed away with it. I even gave Romania a standing ovation after their performance, it was that incredible. You don't see adjoined perspex pianos very often and this one had magical qualities, too!

The other three that I was really cheering for were "Opa!" by Greece's entrant Giorgos Alkaios and Friends, "Je Ne Sais Quoi" from Iceland's resident dancefloor diva Hera Björk and The SunStroke Project's "Run Away" from Moldova. Greece did quite well early in the evening, but their support collapsed at the end they only managed eighth, meanwhile Iceland and Moldova had middling results polling 19th and 22nd respectively, which was sad. Even sadder when you consider countries like Belgium, Denmark and Armenia with their ode to apricots (no joke) all polled really well in contrast to their awfulness.

I liked her much more than her song. She was hilarious!
As always there were pleasant disasters and, as always, one was the UK. Their entry with "That Sounds Good to Me" by Josh Dubovie was spectacularly, hilariously dreadful and came an equally hilarious last place. It was a race to last place between the UK and Belarus (and their amazing butterfly costume reveal) with the latter pulling off 24th place to the former's 25th. The UK barely scraped through to double points, which in itself was surprising because several of us were thinking they were going to get nil pois for their "effort".

Watch the entries from Romania, Greece, Iceland and Moldova below. Moldova is particularly fun to watch since they have a fiddle taken directly out of Tron and thrusting saxophones! If you are American and don't get a chance to see Eurovision then I implore you to visit Eurovision's official YouTube page right now and watch them all. You won't regret it (well, maybe some of it).