Freaks, chicks and sir Terrance

The Eurovision Song contest took a new and very much expected direction. There were still some remains of the good old freak show, some ladies running around in latex dresses and some boys dressed as devils and angels. I can also recall a group of pirates singing ‘we are the ho ho ho ho hey hey hey’. But the breath of not so fresh air was provided by the usual fix to dropping sales: the fit chicks.

Mostly they looked like Britney Spears circa 1999. The Ukrainian entry was a hottie, which is why she got my vote, but ultimately along mine and Terry Wogan’s prediction Russian shoe-less entry won. Good. He’ll be able to afford some shoes.

There was a lot of screaming as well. ‘You have to scream a lot, because this is how you know you’re having fun’ said Sir Terence in a flat voice. One of the hosts was struggling a bit with the description of how Belgrade Square is having fun outside in the cold and kept checking her notes. ‘A lot of this is spontaneous, you know’, said Wogan. He was single handedly saving the whole enterprise with his sarcastic comments. I’m sure at some point I heard him say ‘..for fucks sake’ very quietly.

The only better thing was 400 plus team-jaiku thread of our commentary/discussion.

It’s the first time I watched Eurovision in years, but every year there’s a lot of comments on political voting (If the only way to rescue Russia’s diminishing ties with Western Europe is voting them winners in song contest we are indeed all doomed), predictability, shrinking overall standard of entries. And yet ratings (at least the official ones) are going up every year. In 2006 about 102 million people tuned in to watch it. 10 million people in UK alone watched the one last year despite the UK entry – quite like all the other entries – being fairly atrocious. And here am I slagging it of and claiming it’s all about Terry Wogan but actually it’s a sad attempt at justifying the fact that instead of going dancing and drinking at the beach party in Southbank, I spend last night drinking wine and eating ice cream in front of the telly…