Halfway down the Danube

Eurovision!

Yes, we watched it. Carlos and I, Saturday night, up past midnight.

If you're an American or something, and you don't know what Eurovision is, A Fistful of Euros has a good description. This Kieran Healy post from last year is also nicely informative.

And how was it, you ask?

It was great. Absolutely fantastic. Three hours well spent. When the acts were bad -- which most of them were -- we had fun discussing just /how/ they were bad. When they were horrible, that was even better. And when they were good...

...well, actually none of them were what you'd call /good/. A couple of them were OK -- the Serbian brass and string group, the Turkish ska band.

As usual, the voting was the interesting part. Some surprises (Albania giving votes to Serbia, and vice versa; Greece and Turkey giving some points to each other). And some complete non-surprises -- the usual exchange of "12s" between Greece and Cyprus, and Russia and Ukraine.

...In case you have been living under a rock, or are American: it came down to a dramatic four-way race between Greece (awful), Ukraine (awful, but very energetic), Turkey (okay) and Serbia (okay). Ukraine won, with a special-effect-and-costume-intensive act that has been accurately described as "Janet Jackson meets Xena and Hercules". The winner gets to be the next host, so it'll all be happening next year in Kiev.

Also fun bits: the announcers of the country votes tend to be very cute young women with perfect teeth (60%), very cute young men with perfect teeth (20%), or aging media stars (10%). The sole exception was Albania, which inexplicably had a podgy sixtyish guy in a bad suit, who looked like he was the Deputy Assistant Minister for Finance. Oh, and the Serbian announcer, -- one of the VCY females with PT -- seemed to be intoxicated to the point of very nearly falling out of her dress.

I staggered into bed around 1 am. That's very, very late for us these days; the kids get us up a little after 6, and that's if they don't wake us up in the night.

My only regret? That we didn't drink more. I'm usually a very moderate consumer of alcohol, but watching Eurovision is one of those rare special occasions that cries out for beer and lots of it.

Next year.

Posted by douglas at May 19, 2004 11:49 AM