The Eurovision Political Contest

Sigh.

We're not in a Balkan country. Or an ex-Russian territory. Or a Baltic country. In short, we're unlikely to win the Eurovision Song contest until everyone else has forgotten about Iraq - or been forced to vote according to the quality of the song entry, not whether or not they're mates with another country.

It's sad - there were some intruiging songs in there, not great, but interesting. And ours wasn't bad, you know. I am aware that the papers have criticised Scooch for their performance (especially the Daily Mirror), but they did well - the performance was funny, they weren't out of tune, and the song was a good one in Eurovision terms - it was silly, fluffy pop, subtly filthy, and accompanied by daft costumes and at least one permatan. In fact, all we needed was for the two guys to be sporting healthy beards and we'd be able to claim we'd followed the Abba formula...

And we, the humble voting public of the UK did vote this through as our representative. We can hardly blame Scooch for not winning - we sent them there, and they don't decide to mount illegal invasions of other countries. We should be proud of them, I think - they certainly deserved to do a lot better in the voting than they did.

The voting is ridiculous. It always was, but its worse now. There were always the predictable love-ins: Greece and Cyprus; Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden; Portugal and Spain. But now we have countless countries voting, and surely we can't be sure that there's not some rigging going on somewhere...

The song that won, quite simply, was awful. It was dirgy, had perhaps the least exciting performance of the show, and a performer who had the on-stage charisma of a squashed ant. It's neatly summed up by her views on music:

'I listen to music - I don't want to watch it, I want to listen to it.'

Which misses the entire point of Eurovision, surely.

Scooch had a catchy song, and maybe it was a little out of date in that sense (as Tim Moore argues here). But hang on, a lot of the other songs were rocky power ballads - a staple from the 1980s... And the only differences that spring to mind are Ireland (awful as it was, it was a truely Irish pop song - folky and twee. And in need of stronger vocals), Estonia (hmm. It was just an old drag queen - the song was not at all memorable), and Sweden (an interesting 60s throwback with a man who looked a bit ridiculous).

Oh, and the French. That was worse than awful with a small bald man resembling Richard O'Brien running round and round the band shouting into the mic, completely distracting from the act.

The German entry was very good as I remember though, nice to see something as different as swing making it onto the Eurovision stage. but that disappeared too.

I'm a quiet Eurovision fan, but I'm no less disappointed with this year's show. Something needs to change. If the people running the show were there on Saturday and heard the boos coming from the audience, maybe they'll get the message somewhere along the line.

I love music, and I love the art of songwriting, and that is what this is meant to showcase. Instead, its a daft circus which is followed by a biased and allegedly corrupt method of determining a winner.

Time for a regime change, George and Tony?