Eurovision last night - results and my verdict

 

Switzerland won. I've no complaints. This weird body-balancing act would have been my third choice. Good to have a third-time winner (last time 1988) from a non-obvious country without political issues muddying the waters. 

Singer 'Nemo' is, it's said, the first 'non-binary' winner to take the title. (I had to look up that term for its meaning. I just can't keep up with the lingo!) 

Second came my own vote, Croatia, an act and song as daft as any, but I liked it on first hearing.........

In third place, a song (part-ballad, half rap) which didn't appeal to me at all, Ukraine, two females of, well, disparate size, shall we say......

At number 4 came France with one of two solo male 'power' ballads' with no frills, no backing distractions - just the song simply and here powerfully delivered, and which I thought passable (just) - though with the singer in a perplexing semi-diaphanous outfit, and wearing underneath it what seemed to be just a nappy/diaper........

and

And in 5th place, the contentious Israeli entry (but of course!). We were told there was some boos from the 70,000 audience but I didn't hear any. I thought the song indifferent. Incidentally, it seems that the British public voted to give its maximum points for this entry. Why? Out of 'sympathy' for having to face demonstrations?........

Poorish showing (yet again!) for the U.K., coming 18th out of 25, which is actually much better than most of our recent entries........

I still think our act, visually, was the best out of the lot, though the song itself was no great shakes. In the final viewers' vote (now taken from the more than 100 countries globally who take the transmission live!) we were the only participant to receive zero points from the public, our final not-last placing being due entirely to the individual participating countries' appointed juries, which have equal weight with the public vote. (Work that one out!) 

And then there was Spain, with its gloriously outrageous act, which ended up, most sadly of all, in 22nd place. Oh well. C'est la vie!.........

............and, btw, you can't see it here, but those boots the guys are wearing are high-heel stilettos. How they managed to stay upright with all their twisting, writhing and stuff beats me! 

The presenters, Petra Mede (Swede) and Malin Akerma (Swedish-American) did an efficient job. There was, this time, just one occurrence of the dreaded yell of "Are you READY?????"......

Just one further maddening thought on the voting. Like last year, just as the presenters were saying to us that we could vote as many times as we wanted (which I assume meant voting for as many countries, other than one's own), commentator Graham Naughton chimes in on the voting procedure saying that we couldn't vote for the U.K. but must vote for the countrY (resolutely in the singular!) we wanted to win. No mention of voting more than once! This is exactly what had happened a year ago. Why can't they sort the darned thing out, for heaven's sake? And to further cloud the voting issue, after casting my vote, about 15 mins later I wondered what would happen if I tried to vote for Croatia again - so I did, and the same recording of Norton's voice comes on "Thank you. You have voted for Croatia". So was my vote for the same country counted twice? - or is there some mechanism for filtering out multi-votes for the same country? And if I'd tried to vote for our own U.K., would that have gone through? What a shambles! Get it sorted, people!!!!

Oh, yes - and Austria's Conchita Wurst turned up in the interval to briefly join as part of a trio to sing 'Waterloo', a 50th anniversary tribute to, of course, ABBA who won in Brighton (just 12 miles from me sitting here) in 1974........

So, another year gone. All in all, despite the protests against the Netanyahu government as well as the elimination of the Dutch act - of which we still don't know the details - it was a pretty good contest this year, and I'm reasonably satisfied with the result, which itself is a rare thing.

So next year where? Zurich? But somewhere fresh and Alpine for sure in any case. See ya there!