Eurovision 2008

Ella and James Preece are a Catholic couple living in Kingston Upon Hull in Yorkshire in the UK. This is our blog.

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Blogged by James Preece on 25th May 2008

Introduced by Zosia in 2004, the Eurovision Party has become a regular part of every year. The songs are rubbish, we always lose, but we have a good time. This year, we left our planning a bit late, we completely failed to realise that Eurovision was even happening until the day before... fortunately a few phone calls was all it took to round up some friends.

For those of you in America who may not be familiar. The Eurovision Network is an association of broadcasters who swap TV shows and news clips. Once a year they hold a song contest. It used to be taken very seriously when my parents were young but it's turned in to a bit of a joke.

The procedure is this.. countries submit songs, drippy girl songs, comedy songs, ballads etc. Then every country votes for the countries they like the most. England always loses. Winners from previous years have included Ukraine in 2004 with Wild Dancers and Finland in 2006 with Hard Rock Hallelujah.

This year, the song that should have won was was undoubtedly this one from Latvia...

But, alas, the pirates were robbed. We also quite liked this one from Croatia...

But, alas, the old men were robbed (despite the awesome playing of bottles). The offering from Bosnia was crazy as was the song from Spain. Fr Massie liked Denmark.

Subsequent YouTube searching revealed that we missed out on Bulgaria which never made it to the final and a comedy Turkey from Ireland resplendent with lines like "Eastern Europe we like you, do you like Irish stew?".

The final result? The UK came joint last alongside Poland. The winners were Russia with crap. As Terry Wogan said towards the end, it's not really a song contest anymore.

But was it ever?

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Reader Comments

zosia said...

well, at least someone has kept up the tradition! I didnt do anything this year - i was flat hunting instead...oh the joys! I remember the quality of the wild dancers though!
I hope the three of you are well
Zx

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