eurovision note

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i: armenia for the win
ii: norton NOT AT ALL AS BAD AS WOGAN hurrah (in fact fine given i hate him; and given he was doing a total "wogan script")
iii: ukraine = is this the hardcore continuum i heard so much about? the whacky moscow camerawork was (i assume) putin-ordered sabotage
iv: utterly baffled by the unanimous runawayness of norway
v: brit song also did better than should have but it was a slow year really
vi: new voting system good for professional craft earnestness; will deliver pbs-ification of eurovision
vii: eurovision-as-carmodian-space news... i thought very little, except maybe continued rise of small, under-regarded nations (armenia, moldova) (were they even in any previous final? moldova is the smallest and poorest country in europe, i believe, and just returned an actual old-skool communism-for-communists party to govt by free and fair election)

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

Norway = I guess if it got 150 points I could see how/why, as in it was like no other entry. But is the cuteness really worth 400 points?

I liked Azerbaijan, Turkey, Estonia did the classical thing quite well - hated the British entry. Ukraine was hilarious.

I felt Romania were better than the points they got? Armenia and Moldova were pretty good, yeah. I really like the Eastern European countries and the touches they add. Western Europe is shit => France was garbage; Germany an atrocity exhibition.

Norton should have tried to subtly rubbish the "Wogan scipt". Not bad, but to return to 'its all about the music now not about the block voting that is actually such a minor element it doesn't actually determine the winner' is a terrible piece of commentary. Although he wasn't helped by the fact that Norway was gonna win 5 mins in to the voting.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

so is it live or pre-recorded? norton's script was so evidently wogan-ish that it screamed shared script-writer to me (unless norton is a genius as sustained mimic: there was literally NOTHING said that wogan wouldn't have said, in almost the same delivery); but a script needs someone to have seen it in advance -- not necessarily MUCH in advance, a half hour time delay would probably be enough... it needn't be auto-cue script so much as "make this joke about this" (viz the blue gimp)

i find i don't find norton's judgmentalism at all a problem -- i guess it's somewhat self-undermining as regards conventionalism, given norton's general shtick -- where wogan's i always found insufferable)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

my feeling about the british entry was pretty much "A for effort, F for effect", but this is -- despite everything, including Andrew Lord Webern -- enough of an improvement on "F for effort, F for effect, cue intlerable whining about outrage of results" that I didn't mind an upper mid-table result, there were worse songs this time, and we don't get exposed (though i'd like to know more about) the tantrums thrown in other countries...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I assume they do a full dress rehearsal and the script is based around that.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

it never struck me it was at ALL scripted when it was wogan - tho to be honest i could never listen to him for more than abt five mins before just turning the sound down and only turnng it up for the performances...

[petronia.livejournal.com]

There's a full (makeup-less) dress rehearsal not to mention semis, all is up on the Youtube!

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

France were the worst.

I voted for Denmark (the whole Ronan Keating impression was hilarious), Turkey (she was a comely lass), and Iceland (she was kinda like Taylor Swift). I didn't get the Norway song at all. I didn't mind the German entry either.

I would like to see the results based purely on phone votes, it must be possible to extrapolate this data?

[koganbot]

Immediately YouTubes Iceland... not nearly as probing or lacerating as Taylor... is very '70s. Song isn't bad but would do better with an Italodisco arrangement.

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Bonus points for cutting to the crew of the ISS!

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Also, was expecting a "blue gimp" comment re: Albania.

a

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

i was sort of surpised at the lack of high meta, and wondered if the norwegian was belarussian combined the scandavian and the eastern european blocks.

Re: a

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think the new judging system may have blocked off the potency of high meta -- as well as phonevotes there's a contribution from a "professional panel", and it's (allegedly) attuned to the idea of songwriting as opposed to awarding points for "thrillpower wtf performance"... the public can be wowed in the here-and-now and (cf lordi) now and then have been; but it's harder to see how these panels of judges can be worked Lordiwise: not that lordi was lousy, anything, but the lordi-effect skews towards Awesome Spectacle Lousy Song... perhaps more to the point, it's the fear of this which has caused the panels to be brought in...

Re: a

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

recall that the first (possibly second) year of pure phonevoting delivered dana international onto the one: the panels are there now to counter this kind of "taint"; viz the phonevoters voting for the "wrong reasons"

as with x-factor etc, the technics of working the panels will gradually unfold over the next few years

Re: a

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

how would verta or dustin the turkey or even dana international do this year?

also, i kind of loved portugal

Re: a

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes, the phones-only votes are a carve-up between song, spectacle and regional diaspora effects: bringing in juries seems to leave spectacle the gooseberry. The problem is that spectacle is one of the main reasons for watching Eurovision (especially now the net and the semis mean the song ppl can make their judgements well before) so they're playing a dangerous game if they've instituted a voting system that downplays it.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I wasn't sure whether UK success was based on panels-of-songwriters-give-love-to-ALW factor or what has clearly been a prolonged promotional effort targeting media in other countries (Norton kept saying 'she was on TV in Belarus only last week etc.). The actual UK song I thought was very dreary - like a blanded-out version of the X-factor winner songs. I still think the almost-total-impossibility of using any UK 'folk' reference points even in costume is really interesting. Obviously there's the UK is a multi-national state issue, but even if we elide UK and England, the fact that England has thrown up so little 'trad' volkish nationalist mythmaking seems obtrusive in a situation like this. The fact the UK taste is so directly anti-naff (meaning pro-modernist/cosmopolitan/cool) and that folk elements point backwards or towards a barely-modernised peasant/rural constituency that UK pretends not to have (and in fact may not have had for longer than others) seems relevant too. Key question here = do other countries manage to have 'straight' commentary, or do France and Germany camp it up in a 'pity our mittel-europa-n country cousins' kind of way.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Daz' naughty schoolgirls = UK folk costume!

The UK entry is the only one whose chorus I can remember today. That doesn't stop it being bad, but ALW knows what he's doing.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I can't remember it at all - I am obviously ALW-proof. But TBH I can't remember any of them, but then I am feeling a bit groggy all told.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

also it would take a truly mighty chorus to dislodge Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes from my cranium.

[koganbot]

vi: new voting system good for professional craft earnestness; will deliver pbs-ification of eurovision

How so? PBS isn't mere "worthiness," it's also "alternative to the mainstream" and can even be "subversive" in its "worthiness." So "legitimate" songwriting and "quality" singing and staging aren't necessarily PBS, any more than American Idol and X Factor are PBS. For PBS, think Death Cab For Cutie, not Streisand.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i was thinking of "rendered lame in the context of our appreciation" really i suppose -- the competition has been chaotically wide open for years, with no one having a consistent bead on what it;s for, what;s going to happen, what the audience wants to happens, and etc: now that it has a professionalised focus, i think limits are being drawn andi think the result (long term) is going to be a smallening of possibility, x y and z all ruled out not because someone has said "x y and z"are ruled out explicitly, but because such and such a panel is worried about a, b and c being too much the focus

on the way to pbs it may actually produce something amazing

[cis.livejournal.com]

Norton started out nowhere near as bad - in fact he kept saying things i agreed with - and then suddenly it was 'lol fatsoes' and 'oh go on [name of country] give us a point' and ugh.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think he started getting bored and catty about three quarters of the way through -- the giving of the marks is always a trial, with 40 ppl getting 25 seconds to seize the moment, and do more than just award 12 points to norway

(case in point: slovenia! "a minute's silence!" in eurovision terms that's like laibach's singer wearing antlers while he sings!)