Eurovision 2010: LIVE BLOG

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23:13 Germany wins, and all the songs we like got nowhere. And the UK ended up finishing BOTTOM OF THE ENTIRE CONTINENT, meaning we weren’t even right about that. Mind you, in a roundabout way, Wales beat England (as in Cyprus beat the UK, right at the arse end of the table), which is about as Pyrrhic a victory as you can get.

Anyway, goodnight, and thanks for tuning in! We’ll leave you with a glimpse of much happier times.

 

23:00 Remember when we said the UK would finish second from bottom, right at the start of this live blog?

LOOK ASTONISHED.

22:40 Germany are storming it, despite their entry being so bloody exciting we can’t even remember what it was. Anyway, Estonia’s results are being announced by what appears to be Sasha Baron Cohen’s camp new comic character.

22:24 Ouch. There’s just been an utterly great interval showpiece where the show cut live to dancing flashmobs from around Europe, and about a billion people dancing at a concert in Hamburg. Then they did a slightly weak gag about the main Eurovision boss guy, which didn’t work at all. It went down about as well as when the CEO of whichever company is sponsoring the British Comedy Awards gets to present an award. Anyway, scores! Numbers! Woo! (Exciting food update: the thing we got to eat was: a chilli dog. It was quite nice.)

21:59 That’s all the songs. Coming soon, the only bit we used to watch of the entire evening, because it involves lots of numbers being added up really slowly, and we’re quite geeky like that. Right now though, we’re going to get something to eat. Everyone on Twitter wants Albania to win. We’re a bit worried that having to host Eurovision might just bugger up their economy. Won’t anyone think of the poor Albanian public?

21:31 HOLY FREAKING SHIT. The male host was just doing a piece to camera, when suddenly he stopped talking, and just started staring, blank and utterly emotionless.

His unflinching gaze maybe only lasted about ten seconds, but it was so utterly chilling that it seemed to last long enough for whole continents to form and break away, for entire universes to be born and die.

The camera slowly panned in, as if to press him into reacting, leaving his cold merciless glare looming ever larger on hundreds of millions of plasmas, LCDs and CRTs around the planet. The only faint signs of life were his nostrils, flaring and contracting wildly as his breathing grew quicker and quicker with each passing second, and his eyes, which began to dart around frantically, as if he had just become fully and overwhelmingly conscious that it’s this, this moment right now that will come to define his entire time on this planet, and that anything else he does from this point on will just seem empty, hollow, pointless and futile. As soon as the credits roll in about eighty minutes, he will never again be able to taste the feeling of astonishing power that he has right now. He may be at the top of the rollercoaster ride, but everything from this moment, to the day he dies, will just seem blank by comparison. Every. Single. Thing.

  And yet… his body and face was frozen. Utterly motionless. His eyes darted around furiously, as if they were now the only part of his body not utterly, irrevocably paralyzed by the moment, the biggest moment, his moment. His rigid grin granted a terrified and transfixed global audience a terrifyingly revealing clue towards the huge explosion of fear, paranoia, ecstacy and dread going on inside his mind.

Finally, there was an almost imperceptable shake of his head, and he said “Portugal, there. And now let’s take a look at the next contestant.” It was a moment that had us truly spellbound.

Nah, not really. There was a rubbish joke about Iceland’s volcano and then some more disappointing ballads.

21:24 Romania are on, and they’ve got a cheap-looking perspex two-person grand piano. Their chorus rhymes the word “fire” with the word “desire”. Was it written by a ten-year-old? That should be punishable by a hefty fine and a one-year suspension from the competition, if you ask us. Uh-oh - it also throws the word “higher” in there, too. We’d up the ban to five years for that.

 21:18 There have been more bands on. Albania’s entry was really good, Iceland’s entry was instantly catchy and pretty damn ace, the others were mostly rubbish. BUT! Here comes France, and a jumpy Europop song that is also the nation’s official World Cup song. It’s quite good, and seems to necessitate a load of jumping around, which makes it hard to get a decent screen capture of them.

 OUR TOP FOUR SO FAR: 1. Iceland. 2. Albania. 3. Moldova. 4. France.

21:03 Turkey’s turn, and a manufactured nu-metal band so very unexciting they make Limp Bizkit look edgy. This is probably as close as we’re getting to ‘interesting’ this year, apart from Moldova’s entry, which is the best song so far. Instead of watching Turkey’s song – which tries to amp up the excitement by having someone pretending to be a robot on stage – we’re looking at more pictures on Wikipedia from Eurovision 2008. It was brilliant. Where’s Rodollfo Chikilicuatre when you need him?

And just look at Slovenia’s entry from 2008:

That’s proper ‘interesting’, Turkey.

20:58 One of the hosts has just given us a (pre-recorded) glimpse at Graham Norton’s commentary booth, and a nice chat with him. This was quite excellently talked all over by Graham Norton himself, dismissing it all for the lightweight pan-continental faff it is. At one point, Norton pointed out that he had nothing to do with the interior design of his booth, and that it was all the producer’s fault. And no wonder, it looks like it’s been vandalised by the BNP.

20:46 Summary of last few acts. Belarus, dull, though we did get to make a rubbish joke about them being called Three Up Two Down, just so we could name check the late Michael Elphick. Ireland’s entry is nicely scaled back, and Quite Good If You Like That Sort Of Thing. We suspect our mum likes this one the best so far. As we type, Greece are up, with a song we’ve now heard twice in one week. First time around, it was tolerable. Second time: annoying.

Why can’t it all be like Eurovision 2008, which was the first one we ever watched in full, with loads of brilliantly demented acts like Laka…

Kreisraadio…

Ireland’s magnificent Dustin The Turkey, which made mention of Terry Wogan’s wig. Sadly, it got knocked out in the semi final, meaning the UK was robbed of the chance to hear Sir Tel explode with mock outrage in the final…

All that, PLUS Seb Tellier, singing the best Eurovision song of recent years. BRING BACK THAT TYPE OF EUROVISION, not the useless frigging rejected Big Fun album filler that the UK is represented by this year. It’s just the kind of song an EastEnders actor in their early 20s would use to launch a pop career, crawl to number 37 in the charts, and subsequently disappear from the music industry completely.

20:39 Yikes. It’s like a The Fly-type teleportation had been tried out by Kenneth The Page from 30 Rock, and somehow Casey Tatum from the Uncle Muscles sketches in Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job and Photoshop’s ‘Gaussian Blur’ tool had both crawled into the booth at the same time. A horrible mutation takes place, resulting in…

20:34 Belgium. A man and a guitar. Boring. We did get a nice arty screencap of it though. Why couldn’t Vive La Fete be the choice for Belgium? Because they’ve got artistic integrity? Ah, right.

 20:29: An earnest entry from Wales, there. Not very good, but we still want it to win. Over on Twitter, the reliably great @lauriepink is doing live sketches of all the entrants. Well worth a look. Better than the uninspired chod we’re coming out with on here. Everyone just uses Twitter now. No-one is even going to be reading until tomorrow, at which point it’ll be out of date. Tsk. We can’t post rambling self-defeatism like this on Twitter! Oh, and Bosnia-Herzegovina's entry is quite good. Not ‘Moldova’ good, but ‘better than the Welsh song’ good.

20:24: Moldova’s turn, as despite being represented by an annoyingly ‘wacky’ berk with a neon violin (he’s just stuck his tongue out at the camera. Have some decorum, man!), and an Aqua tribute act, it’s bloody catchy. Proper late 90s catchy pop. Our current favourite to win.

Ooh, Wales are up. For some reason, the montage seems to be set in Cyprus. We’re still saying it’s Wales, though. It was close as we’re getting to a World Cup finals any time soon.

20:16. What vision of hell is this? Spain’s entry is quite bad, but at least livened up by being performed by a strange amalgam of Jedward and former Bolton Wanderers lynchpin Ivan Campo, backed with disturbing people dressed up as toys. Spain, of course, are one of the countries who didn’t have to pre-qualify for the final, much like the UK. One reason ‘we’ always do so badly is that the UK’s entry is up against a load of songs that were already good enough to survive one phone vote. The main reason the UK always does so badly is that the songs are always unmitigated shite, of course.

Norway are up now. Not a song we’re really going for, but the sort of thing that could well win. It’s not terrible, but the sort of thing that could be the closing music for a slightly annoying Richard Curtis romantic comedy, and as such a song we could never really like.

20:10. IT BEGINS. Eurovision 2010 is GO, and after a fashion, so does our live blog (we had a pop-up to update Windows Live Writer, we downloaded it, then couldn’t install it strai… you don’t care? Okay!). Throughout, we’ll also be tweeting, because we’re a multiplatform service. Not much going on yet, though. Azerbaijan are first up, and it’s a bit bland. Expect us to use the world ‘bland’ quite often, going by most of the songs that won through from the semis. We might not even bother watching it, but we want to see how well Wales do. Admittedly, Wales aren’t really there, but a Welsh chap is singing for Cyprus, and not in a bad version of World In Motion sense (“We’re singin’ for Cyprus! Cy! Per! Us!)”).

PREDICTION: The UK’s entry to finish second from last.