What The Hell Just Happened?

We wuz robbed again (#673 in a series)!

OK, the UK's entry in the Eurovision Song Contest final in Basel on Saturday night didn't do as badly as the past two years (when Mae Muller got a meagre 24, then Olly Alexander got 46) - several countries' juries gave us points, and Italy gave us the full 12 - but once again, it seems, the voting public out there still hate us...

Still, our party was fab, raucous fun as always!

Hils (Albania), John-John (Sweden), Baby Steve (Estonia), Sally (Poland), Lou (Norway), Me (host/UK), Madam Arcati (Spain), Houseboy Alex (Italy), History Boy as "Kant" (Malta), Terry Wogan shrine.

The show - as ever - was a long haul. It opened at 8pm, with a bizarre (Swiss-style) intro involving a locked box containing the trophy, mountaineers and - ahem - goats. It closed after midnight.

We made it to the end and beyond, having endured (among many others) "Elliot Page starring in a musical Dune" [as described by The Independent] (Norway), an S&M tribute to Gaia (Poland), smiling-yet menacing "witches" (Latvia), the Icelandic equivalent of Jedward, a Munchkin singing a tribute to a far greater ESC entry in 1965 by France Gall (Luxembourg), the controversial dance number that had to change its lyrics because the plastic-surgery-afflicted singer's pronunciation of "Kant" (= "singing" in Maltese) sounded too much like "cunt", a dull (and rather flat) soul-pop ballad by a man singing to his younger self in a mirror (Netherlands), a big mama with a club banger that appeared be about hallucinogenic drugs (Denmark), another (thunder-thighed) dominatrix with a thinly-veiled song about orgasms (Finland), a dull song from a girl to whom maquillage is an alien concept (Switzerland), a woman whose idea of "set gimmick" was to have a load of sand poured on her (France), a shirtless "macho-action-hero" on a running machine (Armenia), a Bowie-wannabee [who I thought looked more like an anorexic Alice Cooper] being all pretentious with a giant-sized grand piano, and a petulant gang of bored grunge-types from Lithuania. It's nothing if not varied...

Of course, there had to be "novelty songs" or else it wouldn't be Eurovision - and two of them were in our gang's Top 5 [yes - we do all have scorecards, as well as all the dressing up, and the booze-and-buffet-of-all-nations]:

#2 - Estonia: Tommy Cash - Espresso Macchiato

#3 - Sweden: KAJ - Bara Bada Bastu

We tried, and failed, to do Mr Cash's "wobbly-leg dance" all evening!

Also scoring well in the "Dolores Delargo Towers jury" votes:

#4 Greece: Klavdia - Asteromáta

#5 Spain: Melody - Esa Diva

The voting in the actual contest was a bit different... A good chunk of the viewing time is given over to the various representatives of the professional juries of all thirty-seven participating countries reading out their votes [our spokesperson was "Dame" Sophie Ellis-Bextor!], and by the end of it the UK had not done too badly:

1 Austria 258
2 Switzerland 214
3 France 180
4 Italy 159
5 Netherlands 133
6 Sweden 126
7 Latvia 116
8 Greece 105
9 Estonia 98
10 United Kingdom 88

Unfortunately, then came the public votes - and the whole thing turned on its head! It turned into a close-run battle that saw Israel, Estonia, Sweden, Austria and Albania (in that order) at the top of the list - and no-one, in the entire voting world, gave the UK a single point. AGAIN! [Nor, interestingly, did the host nation Switzerland get any public votes either.]

Adding the two totals together inevitably meant that the ditzy little queen with the operatic counter tenor voice won the competition...

JJ - Wasted Love [Austria]:

He's talented, that much is true, but as songs go... Meh. As The Independent [again, link as above] put it, "Expect future Eurovisions to be awash with tracks resembling rave remixes of Tosca. And for the event to become ever more about optics than earworms."

Sigh.

I'll leave the final comment to "our girls" - whose performance was, in our gang's opinion, brilliant, and whose song was a damned sight better than a shitload of others for whom the audience did deign to give points:

Dolores Delargo Towers jury #1, United Kingdom: Remember Monday - What The Hell Just Happened?

Same time, next year?

Of course!!!!