Coming up tonight – Eurovision 2008 liveblogging

~ Inquisitor

Later tonight, why not come over to Twitter and watch my Eurovision 2008 live blog? (If Twitter’s not working, I’ll do it here.) I like Sebastian Tellier. I don’t think our entry’s the worst thing we’ve ever put in; not when our last few included Scooch and Daz Sampson. Who knows, we might even come in halfway through the table… hah.

What follows behind the “continue reading” link is a reprint of my Twittering for the Your Decision show with added explanatory and exclamatory comments.

The Eurovision show this year was run on a somewhat odd selection method. The six competitors were divided into three groups of two, one of which would be eliminated immediately after the performances by a pair of judges (one of whom was John Barrowman), with Terry Wogan having the deciding vote. The three winners of this, along with a wildcard picked by Terry, would go to the phone lines. It really was seriously unfair.

The first pair of songs were girl groups: Loveshy with “Mr. Gorgeous” and the Revelations with “It’s You”.

  • Loveshy: they may have a decent tune, but they’re out of it. 07:10 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • At least the overall sound this year isn’t horribly tinny – they’ve hired in a decent sound engineer this time! 07:11 PM March 01, 2008 from web

This has been a longstanding problem with BBC live music shows since BBC Resources was privatised – bad sound mixing, generally sounding extremely tinny and with vocals lost somewhere under the bassline. It might work well on a cheapo LCD TV speaker but I run all my TV sound over optical to my separates setup and it’s quite amazingly irritating. It got worse during the programme, sadly.

Sometimes it’s fine: Madonna on BBC Three was very acceptable, for example, as were the Diana concert and Live Earth whenever they weren’t cutting people’s sets to prerecordings of Rihanna we’d already seen.

  • The answer to the question “what should we put into Eurovision?” is always “the kind of thing others _aren’t_”. What’s up right now? 07:13 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • I know Popjustice like the Revelations, but I think the song’s nothing really. 07:15 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • Oh, there’s a wildcard system where Terry can pick one of the losers as an attempt to ward off the unfairness of the pairing. 07:18 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • Either that, or they could just PLAY THE BLOODY BANDS AND TAKE THE BLOODY VOTES. 07:19 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • It was this sort of voter screw-around that mucked up last year, of course. 07:19 PM March 01, 2008 from web

The second set of competitors were “Joseph vs. Maria” – that is, a loser from Any Dream Will Do paired with a loser from How Do You Solve A Problem Called Maria?. It was quite obviously why they both lost, to be honest; the songs were Rob McVeigh with “I Owe It All To You” and Simona Armstrong with “Changes”.

Yes, that is the clip from Shark Attack III: Megalodon. Fantastic. Best thing he’s ever done.

The third pair were the reality TV pairing – an X Factor loser (to Shayne Ward) and an ex-EastEnders actress who’s lost more reality shows than you’d care to name. The songs were Andy Abraham with “Even If” and Michelle Gayle with “Woo (U Make Me)”.

At around this point I V+ paused it for the usual reasons you V+ pause things, so some of the timings will be off in comparison to the actual show.

  • “No strangers to the charts”? Really? Who the hell are they? 07:37 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • You don’t want to go to Serbia, Andy. It’ll probably be wherever they can find the biggest studio at the shortest notice. 07:39 PM March 01, 2008 from web

Surprisingly, it appears to have gone ahead there.

  • Not horrible, this (on the Eurovision song comparative scale.) 07:47 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • “The words Modern and Eurovision don’t go together…” Terry, most Eurovision songs ARE modern nowadays, we haven’t had oompah for years. 07:49 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • Oh well, it’s phone lines now. 07:56 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • The BBC used to offer email voting for Making Your Mind Up but stopped when phone lines became too profitable. A real shame. 07:56 PM March 01, 2008 from web

They really did offer email voting for MYMU a few years ago, and they really should do it again; Popjustice fans stormed it voting for the least worst entry.

  • Oh NO. They’re doing the top-two revoting thing again. That’s what got us Scooch last time. BASTARDS. 07:58 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • In any case, see you all at 9:30 for the results show. Hope it’s not too much of a disaster. 08:25 PM March 01, 2008 from web

Incredibly, the entire second stage of the programme was retained completely from MYMU, which had proven itself a complete failure last time round.

During the break for Casualty, you could call a number of premium rate phone lines for the four winners – the Revelations, Simona Armstrong, Michelle Gayle and Terry’s wildcard Andy Abraham – and on the results programme the lines would be closed. Then the bottom two from this four would be dropped off and the lines reopened again.

Last time round, this had been a fight between the awful and cookie-cutter “wacky” Scooch, who looked just as fake and unendearing as they actually are when compared to the other humour acts at last year’s Eurovision (specifically, the Ukranian entry) and thus ended up third last, and a woman called Cyndi singing a Celine Dion-style ballad which considering what won would have probably done quite well.

  • This “top two” system is awful. It was awful then, it’s awful now. Why can’t voting for any of these shows be FAIR? 09:32 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • Winkelman: “I know, it’s unfair!” Too true. 09:33 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • Dear God, I’m agreeing with Claudia Winkelman. 09:34 PM March 01, 2008 from web
  • And no surprises whatsoever, it’s the X Factor loser and the EastEnders actress who get through to the runoff. 09:34 PM March 01, 2008 from web

I really had nothing to say at this point. Neither song was that awful, when compared with Scooch. They floated by.

Last year, Wogan screwed up. Both he and the copresenter had earpieces telling them the winner from backstage, and Wogan misheard so announced Cyndi at the same time as the copresenter announced the unfortunately actual winner Scooch. Confusion resulted and the wrong people won.

Folks, they actually had a writer for this.

The French have entered Sebastian Tellier this year. I knew who he was before Eurovision, and it’s a good song too. Most of the Eastern Europeans enter acts who are big all around the region, which is the real reason they all vote for each other; you can even find lots of people sticking their music videos on YouTube. I know how big Robbie Williams, for example, is in Europe. Why can’t we even consider someone like him entering? At least once, give it a try. We might be pleasantly surprised.

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Published by Inquisitor

Software developer, occasional tweeter, semi-occasional writer. The pseudonym is after one of the better Red Dwarf villains of the week. @inquisitor on Twitter, @inquisitor@mas.to on Mastodon, @inquisitor.flickeringframe.com on Bluesky, not to be confused with an American tabloid (I had it first).