{"id":13591,"date":"2012-05-29T08:28:44","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T12:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=13591"},"modified":"2012-05-29T12:57:14","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T16:57:14","slug":"good-evening-europe-its-douze-points-to-sweden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/good-evening-europe-its-douze-points-to-sweden\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Evening, Europe! It\u2019s Douze Points to\u2026Sweden!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At 11.30 pm in the UK the <strong>Eurovision Song Contest<\/strong> has just finished, and the favourite, <strong>Sweden<\/strong>, romped home with a rather lumpen and tuneless disco dirge that somehow captivated the hearts of the 42 competing nations.  At least we didn&#8217;t have to stay up until 3.30 am, which is what it is in the host country of Azerbaijan, where the annual festival of cheese didn&#8217;t start until midnight their time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Engelbert Humperdinck<\/strong> kicked off proceedings for the UK with an inoffensive ballad which didn&#8217;t really do anything, and garnered just enough votes to put him second to last, fractionally ahead of Norway, whose song I can&#8217;t remember either.<\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/i4qmsmzoRBE?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p><strong>The Russian Grannies<\/strong> ended up over a hundred points behind but still in second place, and put in an exuberant performance having added the presence of a great big oven from which they produced a large tray of biscuits just ahead of the final chorus, which must have been glued down given the enthusiasm with which the eldest of their number was dancing around with them.  The clip I posted before now has very nearly three and a half MILLION hits, this live version has almost half a million already.  They were robbed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Serbia<\/strong> came in third with a rather serious sounding ballad, which translated as something like &#8220;Love Is Not a Thing,&#8221; if memory serves, delivered in a stentorian baritone by a man in a suit.<!--nextpage--><\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/O_9QaVC-NKw?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p><strong>Jedward<\/strong> bounced around exactly like they did last year, and came in about fourteenth or something like that, but at least we all woke up at that point.  Hopefully <strong>Ireland<\/strong> will let them enter every year, safe in the knowledge that they will never have to stage it again, but can also be confident that they will easily be the most entertaining act of the night.  Jedward recently entered and ran, and apparently did very respectably in, a marathon &#8211; with no training&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Albania<\/strong> did well with a song sung by a lady with what looked like a section of stout rope from a very large ship around her upstanding hairdo, memorable only for her extraordinary ability to sustain a note sung at full belt for what felt like longer than the song itself, while actually getting louder as she held it.<\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/671tCjePT3w?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>It has become common knowledge that the <strong>Spanish entrant<\/strong> had been visited in the middle of the night by a delegation from the Government, who described at some length what would happen to her if she won, thus landing their beleaguered economy with the staging of the thing next year, but despite that she gave it her not inconsiderable all, but finished quite safely some way down the board at the end.  I didn&#8217;t mind the song particularly, but that may have been because my brain had been numbed by what had been going on for the last hour and a half.<\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/S40cLUJRLiE?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>Also making a valiant effort to lose were <strong>Moldova<\/strong>, whose effort I can&#8217;t bring myself to post here,<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure whether <strong>Turkey<\/strong> realised just how terrible this song was, I shall let anyone in the Hall who has made it this far be the judges of that.<!--nextpage--><\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/J1viLmPCeAM?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>They got through the voting fairly quickly this year, it only overran by about fifteen minutes.  As it became quickly apparent that Sweden were walking it, the lead singer of <strong>Lordi<\/strong> in full makeup appeared to give the results for <strong>Finland<\/strong>, and we were all momentarily cheered or terrified depending on whether we&#8217;d watched on that historic occasion when for the first and probably last time metal was allowed to win Eurovision.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Azerbaijan<\/strong> have been the subject of quite a lot of criticism in the last week or so over here for their terrible human rights record, and for demolishing a large number of their people&#8217;s homes to build the venue.  The <strong>Swedish Kate Bush wannabe<\/strong> was being described as &#8220;highly political&#8221; and &#8220;a loose cannon&#8221; as she made her triumphant walk back to the stage there was much speculation over whether she would use the occasion to criticise the hosts, but inevitably she didn&#8217;t, and got back onstage to prowl around doing her thing again, although for the reprise the flashing lights which had led Mrs H to describe the performance as &#8220;a migraine set to music&#8221; seemed to fail and she did her thing with the house lights on as we all grumbled about Russia being robbed, but with the prospect of all being off to Sweden this time next year to lift us.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the winner, I&#8217;m off to bed.<!--nextpage--><\/p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GqYtlpZ-9N4?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><nav class=\"page-links\"><strong>Pages:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/good-evening-europe-its-douze-points-to-sweden\/\" class=\"post-page-numbers\"><span class=\"page-num\">1<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/good-evening-europe-its-douze-points-to-sweden\/2\/\" class=\"post-page-numbers\"><span class=\"page-num\">2<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/good-evening-europe-its-douze-points-to-sweden\/3\/\" class=\"post-page-numbers\"><span class=\"page-num\">3<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/good-evening-europe-its-douze-points-to-sweden\/4\/\" class=\"post-page-numbers\"><span class=\"page-num\">4<\/span><\/a><\/nav>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At 11.30 pm in the UK the Eurovision Song Contest has just finished, and the favourite, Sweden, romped home with a rather lumpen and tuneless disco dirge that somehow captivated the hearts of the 42 competing nations. At least we didn&#8217;t have to stay up until 3.30 am, which is what it is in the <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/good-evening-europe-its-douze-points-to-sweden\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2204,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[607],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2204"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}