Oh dear, it's Eurovision time again. Having said that, though, the quality of the Eurovision Song Contest has risen greatly over the past few years given the state of the competition, with some countries quietly employing professionals to help write songs.
After last year's win to Finland, it's been hosted at Helsinki's Hartwall Areena, somewhere I've been hoping to visit for years for the Assembly demo competition.
I managed to watch the show using the excellent Octoshape P2P streaming plug-in which provided stable video of excellent quality. Finland's YLE with the EBU gave us some awful cut-sequences, Krisse the terrible tart (a not-so-funny Finnish comedian), and even Santa — without which the show wouldn't be tasteless enough to be Eurovision!
Here are my brief comments for the 24 finalists:
- Bosnia & Herzegovina: A little morbid. Lots of arm waving and potato sacks.
- Spain: Out of tune, scary boy-band choreography!
- Belarus: The guy loves himself. What was with the guys stuck to the moving rectangles?
- Ireland: Awful, perhaps would have worked better as a pub song.
- Finland: Not too bad; the Finnish are stuck in their Gothic motif.
- Macedonia: Suddenly it got very windy in Hartwall Areena? Bizarrely cutesy song.
- Slovenia: Very anthematic; impressive voice, and funky hand-light thing. (Peter Poles even joked about this while they were announcing votes.)
- Hungary: Talented blues entry, but she stretched her voice a bit much.
- Lithuania: Professional elevator music. Nothing new here.
- Greece: Make it stop! Some guy with girls on leashes, urgh.
- Georgia: Somehow reminded me of early Björk, but without the whacky voice. Mostly noise though.
- Sweden: Boy George goes to Ikea? He's just a silly boy with his head in a can, apparently.
- France: Apparently French Love requires you dress in pink, run on the spot, prance around like a twat, and sing a horrible song.
- Latvia: The epitome of eurovision, but honestly not too bad.
- Russia: Russian spice girls? Or is that «Девушки Специи»? Now, if they could learn to sing…
- Germany: What can I say: Roger Cicero, you're Germany's Sinatra.
- Serbia: Sorry girls, aimlessly walking around and running your voices through copious amounts of voice processing doesn't make for a good song, regardless of lesbian overtones. (The Paul de Leeuw made references to Kelly Osbourne while announcing their votes!)
- Ukraine: Hillarious! I hope that was the point. Apparently Ukraine's glory has not yet perished, nor her freedom to dress up in drag and dance around to doof-doof.
- United Kingdom: Woah, I thought Ukraine was gay. This was utterly woeful. I can't believe Malta gave them 12 points.
- Romania: Were the Romanians trying to win votes by emulating other European countries they “visit” in their song?
- Bulgaria: Not a bad fusion, although the vocals were a little strong. Didn't really go anywhere.
- Turkey: Typical Turkish pop, not much effort put in this year guys?
- Armenia: Bland.
- Moldova: More Goths, lots of cloth being waved around — nothing really special but still nothing bad.
Serbia won, but I felt Germany (19th) and Slovenia (15th) deserved a lot more credit. Ireland came last, followed closely by the United Kingdom (3rd-last), and I couldn't agree more! It's amusing to see that votes from each country are still politically biased towards surrounding countries of good political ties.
