Eurovision with the rest of Europe

I was working the night of Eurovision, so I duly painted a union flag on my face and trotted along to see what an evening of watching it with representatives from most of the rest of Europe would bring.

Ready to roll!

There were many laughs to be had. My French friend had to go outside for a smoke while their song was on. I can't repeat what she said when she got an earful of that. Never has the expression 'pardon my French' been so appropriate. Apparently their chosen representative wasn't proper French anyway, because he was from Corsica and sang using Corsican dialect. Of course, mes chéries, of course.

Watching the results coming in was probably the most interesting part of the evening. It was all one big discussion of politics, and why if one country gave another country points that we didn't expect, why they might have done that. Obviously the music had nothing to do with it. Why did Bulgaria give the UK 12 points? I have no idea. We were represented by Blue - remember them? They were bad the first time round, and the song they picked for this was worse than any of their previous efforts. I didn't think that was even possible.

The Norwegians looked suitably shamefaced when they awarded their highest numbers of points to the other Nordic countries, I'll give them that. In some ways though I thought the voting wasn't too bad. It's slowly getting more political again following the implementation of a panel of judges for every country as well as the public vote, but if you squint you can see what looks like some genuine voting for the songs.

It'll be interesting having it in Azerbaijan next year anyway. They're usually pretty good, but I wasn't convinced by the song this year. Maybe Europe's just so fed up with Europe we thought we'd have a break from us :p

I didn't actually vote in the end, but there were a couple songs I quite enjoyed, such as this one from Serbia. They didn't do that well, but I thought it was fun, and so colourful!