Sunday, May 27, 2012

I was a Eurovision Virgin

Over the Christmas holidays my friend Gina and I met Johnny Logan, the only 2 time Eurovision champ, in a street cafe in Berlin. We would have been way more impressed if we had any idea what Eurovision was at the time.


You see I was a Eurovision virgin. Until tonight.  Then my friends invited me to Eurovision 2012, and I watched the 26 finalists compete for the Eurovision title. The idea was for each of us to assign scores for song quality, performance and costumes/dancers, and then submit our top three most likely winners to win  the pot of money we assembled.


The opening act was Englebert Humperdinck. Not an auspicious beginning. He was the oldest contestant, and while not the worst he most certainly was not in good form. 


Who was worse you might ask? Well, some chick from Albania with one matted braid resting on her chest looking like the tail of some bedraggled creature for one, and also some generally cheesy acts including Ireland who went for THE BOY BAND factor with one of the two cutie pies repeatedly doing a little Peter Pan sort of leap with a click of his heels. They were pretty untalented otherwise. Rather than a numerical score these two acts received "Bad", "Worse" or "Just plain awful" from me in each of the three categories. I most enjoyed the following comments from the UK announcer:


"Her backup dancers are young offenders and this is their punishment" regarding the Ukraine entry;
  "He won't be getting another 12, but enjoy" regarding Maldova receiving a top score of 12 from one country and finally,
"I've been here too long; I sort of enjoyed that"!


Interestingly, the big 5 countries are automatically entered into the finals, because they give money? And in case you think it is a singing competition, please understand that the voting is almost exactly along geopolitical lines. And Greece always gives first place to Cyprus. It very much reminded me of figure skating before we changed the scoring method.


My top three picks (with links so you can enjoy them too) were
  1. the Russian entry, a group of six 70 something grannies who were fun and charming and had everyone dancing and they came in second. Singing Grannies
  2. Sweden and they came in first. Euphoria
  3. I picked Germany and they did not place in the top 3. Roman Lob
It will take more than one time to really understand the competition, the voting and the results, but next year I have a head start!




2 comments:

  1. This looks like great fun - sort of like American Idol for countries. Or maybe American Idol is more like Eurovision. Whatever! It seems like you need a training program to grasp qualifications for entry, the voting and just how the whole ting works, but I think that's all part of the fun. And ther's nothing like live entertainment!
    So here's my vote:

    3rd: I loved the Dancing Grannies for just pure fun. They seemed to capture the audience too.
    2nd: Roman Lob's song had some quality in the lyric, but a little derivative, and not much creativity in the production.
    1st: Euphoria/Sweden! I liked the song (tied with Roman). More dynamic presentation and high production value. And yeah, she is very attractive.

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    Replies
    1. My friend Janice gave bonus points for effective use of the wind machine. In that case France would have won!

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