oneurope_live

Morning - ish ;)

Well, last night was a bit of a turn up, I can hear you saying?? but was it??

Lets do this backwards and see what we ended up with.

Bulgaria -Strong opener
Belarus - Strong song all round so reports say.
Georgia - Strong
Moldova - hmmmmm? Powerful
Serbia - Generally accepted favourite.
FYR Macedonia - Strong song, but perhaps helped by neighbourly voting.
Hungary - Strong Blues.
Slovenia - Old Fashioned stomper with Popra
Turkey - Uptempo faux latino
Latvia - 6 lads singing an italian aria.

So what we have here are 10 songs that are generally strong, have cross border appeal, and all of which have been noticed in the betting... and yet... people are saying that because they happen to be east of the alps, that is all of a sudden a "bad" thing. Why?

Is it not entirely possible that Western Europe voted for these songs in droves and they too saw them as the best? This possibility has not even been floted on major blogs except this one. This could be because people's knee-jerk reaction is to see what they want to see, and not what could well have happened.

Lets face it - Denmark was never in the running. It appealed to one specific set of audience, which either did not vote or thought it had already got through. DQ looked ridiculous on screen and it just fell flat in the same way that DJ Bobo looked too much like lordi, tried to do the "this has won already" routine, and europe simply went " NO!".
Guri Shanker was the same. She was far too old for that kind of song and it did look like your mum was performing it after she got drunk at uncle fred's party. That song had embarrasement written all the way through it. Edsillia had a dog of a song, written with a formula in mind that had expired long ago, but the Dutch think Europe like that sort of thing. Sadly, they don't and haven't since 1999.

The booing was definitely for a lack of Andorra as opposed to a Moldova. But from what I hear they were flat on the TV.

It is, unfortunatly for the UK media and the conspiracy theorists, a simple fact.

So Called Western Europe is still trying to win a contest that has moved on and they have yet to catch up. Eastern Europe gets it. Pan European appeal works. It's 2007, not 1985 anymore and western broadcasters should do well to remember that when they need to garner televotes and not the ones of the standby jury. Broadcasters have their annual excuse to moan, however they should look in their own back yard, before critising any percieved problem with the contest.