Eurovision wrap up

As everyone who cares knows by now, the Turks won, and the British entrant came last and managed the rare achievement of scoring Null points. (There has been speculation as to whether this had anything to do with Britain's position on the war. I think maybe partly, but not entirely. After all, Israel scored some points. As far as cultural domination is concerned, it's interesting to see how the amount of French in the event has declined. Even a decade ago it was pretty much completely bilingual. These days it is only the French themselves holding out).

Adam (whose links are bloggered) has mind blowingly detailed and funny coverage. He was watching Eurovision in Australia. In Australia the contest does not go out live, which would be from 5am to 8am on Sunday morning, and SBS television instead runs it on Sunday evening. Traditionally, they have just played the British coverage with the delightful Terry Wogan commentary, but for some reason in recent years they have felt the need to Australianise it. Two years ago they cut the program up and tried to put some local colour (Latvian-Australian drag queens and the like) between the songs. They received a lot of complaints, and last year went back to the traditional broadcast. This year, however, they felt the need to send one of their own "personalities" to Latvia to do his own commentary, which is why Adam keeps referring to the "SBS bogan", an expression that is probably not translateable out of Australian English, but I suspect my non-Australian readers do get the drift. There is a reason why Mr Wogan's commentary should be left on the broadcast, which is the same reason that the BBC has been getting him to do it for 30 years (or something). He is really good at it.

Anywway, back to the contest, and in particular the great Austrian.

Incidentally right after the contest we tried to inform ourselves on his (Alf Poier's) homepage and got a "server overloaded" message. I think the world has found a new hero.

Personally I did something that was a Eurovision first for me. I picked up the phone and voted for him. Alf is cool.

Next year I need to attend an actual Eurovision party with lots of alcohol.

Update: Although the Greeks and Cyproits did give one another maximum points, as usual, both countries gave a substantial number of points to the Turkish entrant. Does this indicate some kind of a thawing, or did they just like the Turkish dancers? Most of the Baltic states gave a few points to the Russians, too, although there did seem to be a certain amount of anti-Russian sentiment amongst the live audience in Latvia. Watching the Eurovision voting and figuring out when and how it is influenced by several thousand years of history, is always interesting, at least.