The truth about my Eurovision

A few readers have emailed me out of concern, asking why, when I covered the run-up to Eurovision 2007 on my site so extensively, why did I not comment at all on the event itself? Well, the truth is about to become clear. I spent Eurovision in a state of severe drunkenness at London's finest venue... hosted by Britain's greatest drag-queen, Eb-on-knee see pic on left!


I can't actually remember a lot about the performances, other than that we were mildly pleased with the Spanish entry (I can remember them, they were on at the beginning, before my liver was overwhelmed with alcohol). I regret to say that the middle section of the contest is a blur, and all I remember about that is trying to steal this man's oversized, pink novelty glasses. My memory is a black hole at this point, but swims back into focus when the Ukraine took to the stage and at this point I remember doing a lot of dancing, a lot of cheering and almost ending up in a punch up with a couple of po-faced party-goers who looked like they'd been sucking on lemons. Of course, the highlight of the night was seeing Eb-on-knee. My sister and I are long-time devotees of Britain's greatest drag queen, so we took her a sparkly wand (albeit a cheap one from Claire's accessories) and presented her with it for the evening. Eb-on-knee whipped off her top to reveal a Union Jack corset when Scooch came on stage to sing for the UK. As I said, it's all a blur for me now. As the evening wound up and it became clear that we were going to have to listen to dreary old Serbian entry Molitva being performed as the winner, the silver lining on the cloud was that Eb-on-knee invited us to quaff champagne with her on the floor. The floor which I now remember was carpeted and pretty disgusting. Can't believe I sat on it in my favourite jeans. And as we sat quaffing champagne, the thought popped into my head to ask Eb-on-knee to record a personalised message to one of my mates on my phone, as she couldn't attend Eurovision. And here you can see the result. Look, you can even see her waving the gift we gave her. God bless her!

Praying for Belarus to get through

With less than two hours to pass before the beginning of the long-awaited Eurovision semi-final in Helsinki, I would bet that there are 28 very nervous contestants preparing to give it their all on stage. Koldun will be one of many praying for their chance to make it through to the final on Saturday.

The lot of the losing semi-finalists is a tragic one. Their fate is to be known forever as mere "also-rans", valiant challengers eliminated in the earlier heats of this trashy contest. Eighteen brave thoroughbreds destined to fall at the first furlong. Within the next five hours, eighteen brave contenders will find their ship of dreams crashing spectacularly on the barren rocks of semi-final humiliation. And as you cast your eye down the list of tonight's participants, it's easy to see that some are sailing sturdier ships than others. Some of the ropier entries are only capable of sinking into the abyss.

On this cheerful note, and without further ado, here are my ten predictions on which countries will sail a steady course towards participation in Saturday's final, in no particular order:

Belarus
Turkey
Denmark
Andorra
Bulgaria (she'll get by with a little help from her neighbourly friends)
Switzerland (just about)
Serbia (look at the size of my diaspora)
Macedonia
Slovenia
Cyprus

Video fabulousness from Macedonia

At last, this is what a Eurovision video should look like! It's Macedonia's Karolina and her entry, Mojot Svet, which poor Karolina has controversially been forced to sing entirely in Macedonian. But look at the video, it has all the key ingredients of trashy, pop fabulousness - Glitter and ticker-tape raining down from the skies! A wind machine! And glitterballs, big glitterballs, more glitterballs than your wildest dreams could hope for! Swamped in all this trashy paraphenalia when watching this, you can almost forget that the song isn't as catchy as it really should be. Let's hope Macedonia makes it into the final!