Perhaps I should explain further about Terry before millions of you descend upon me. I thought he was the greatest radio presenter of them all, by far, it's just that I never really liked to watch him on TV and I didn't like the carping sarcasm when he covered the Eurovision stuff. If he really didn't like it, why did he take the money to cover it and then drag it down into a joke?
Whatever. I thought Dusseldorf did a great job of staging the contest. Sure, there were parts of it that were not to my taste, but then, I was watching differing cultures on my screen and at the very least I thought they were interesting. Certainly it made a nice change from the constant stream of cookery programmes.
Coming from outside the music business gives you a different outlook. Every singer in the contest (and it's supposed to be for the SONG) had dancers leaping about and a zillion lighting effects. I guess that must be for the 'vision' part of Eurovision but it did detract from the SONG.
Furthermore when it came to the 'judging' and the results something was GLARINGLY obvious. Countries voted for other countries within their regions or political areas and rarely gave a vote, or at best a low scoring vote, to those countries not in their area.
Surely, as this has been going on for years, the organisers must be aware of this and could take a major step to make the voting more balanced? At the moment you are not allowed to vote for your own country so why not extend that? Look at the history of the voting and the 'zones' leap off the screen. Daniels new rule would be that the organisers create zones, Scandinavian, Baltic, and so on, and you are not allowed to vote for anyone in your zone....
It was also politically interesting to see the AV system in operation, taking people to the top who didn't get the most top votes, just the most second and third votes. Hmmmm.....
p.s. I enjoyed most of them, thought Blue did a good job, liked Italy...
