Eurovision 2008

Saturday night marked the annual procession of European nations across a brightly lit stage accompanied by outrageous costumes and some really bad tunes. This even is also sometimes referred to as Eurovision. It's like the most popular thing ever, although nobody likes to admit they're a fan. It's a song contest that has seemingly very little to do with artistic integrity. It's a mixing of European nations, but includes Israel and Armenia, which in my mind would not fall under the classification of 'European'.

Anyways, it was my first Eurovision viewing. A total of 43 countries entered the competition, including such big names as San Marino, Andorra, Azerbaijan and France. Not including: Italy. To get it down to 25 songs for the big night, there were two semi-finals last week where 38 of those countries had to battle it out for spots. Five countries are given automatic passageway into the final - the UK, Germany, France and Spain (I think at least...) for basically bankrolling the whole thing and Serbia for having won in last year. The show was in Belgrade, again as Serbia won it last year, in Europe's largest basketball arena. I'm not sure if this is saying much, however, as I don't think the basketball love has made it past more than a few European countries. Now on to the show...

It opened with a performance by last year's gender bending winner, featuring half-man half-woman costumes for the back-up dancers. There were two cheesy hosts who had at least decent grasps of English, the woman staying in tune with the latest hostess trends of wearing a different dress every time she came on stage. The UK broadcast had a BBC radio dj providing additional sassy commentary. The show then proceeded with relative little delay through the 25 performances, this in all taking slightly over two hours. To drag things out for as long as possible, all 43 entering countries get to vote. And they each have a person available via satellite to reveal the results of each country's votes. Needless to say, this took an additional hour, but the trends were clearly established well before this, and everyone knew who the winner would be by the time we got to country 30 or so.

So here is how Eurovision voting works: you can't vote for your own country, but you can vote for all your neighboring countries and they can all vote for you. People call in their votes, and each country tallies up their totals. First place gets 12 points, 2nd place 10 points, 3rd 8 points, and then 4th - 10th or so get one less point depending on their order, from 7 points to 6 points. Or maybe its 4th - 9th get 6 points down to 1. I'm not sure, but it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that each country give points to a lot of other countries. Eurovision voting is politically controversial - everyone complains that the former Soviet countries all vote for each other, the Baltic countries all vote for each other, the Scandinavian countries all vote for each other and nobody votes for the UK, no matter what. Except for Ireland and for some reason Malta.

Cutting to the chase, Russia won. Their entry was produced by Timbaland. How they tricked him into producing a Eurovision song is beyond me, but they did. It involved some skinny guy dressed all in white singing in English who ripped his shirt open during some sort of over-powering emotion, and near the end a male figure skater came out and started twirling about in pretty little circles. This was done in a much more masculine way than I'm sure comes across. Terry Wogan, the UK commentator, was of course aghast and think the whole thing should be boy-cotted by the western European countries that pay for it but are basically guaranteed never to win no matter how good their entry. But quite frankly, Terry, I think we all saw that coming.

Other things to note: the Bosnia and Herze, um, yeah that country, their entry included a clothesline and 4 back up singers dressed as old-fashioned brides, ranging in age from about 20 to 60. The French entrant controversially sang in English and made his entry on stage in a golf cart. Ireland's entry sung by a turkey puppet did not make it past the semi-final. Abba won Eurovision back in the 1970s with Waterloo. We also apparently have Eurovision to blame for that whole Riverdance thing - Michael whatshisface and a woman danced their little dance in an Ireland entry circa the dawn of time and they've been big ever since. The UK last won in 1997, but nobody remembers how they were able to do it. I'm certainly not putting any money on them for next year.