Off to Liverpool for a few days.It's a five and a half hour train journey direct from Norwich. Many years ago five and a half hours in any mode of transport would have been daunting, but when compared to well over 20 hours on planes to New Zealand and Australia or 18 hours on coaches to Germany or Northern Ireland, it's just a short jaunt.
Liverpool has the feel of a very compact city with everything in the centre in comfortable walking distance and everything pretty much as we remembered from two years ago - our last visit.
The weather helped today as it was warm and sunny and Albert Dock shimmered in the haze. Our apartment is abut 10 minutes' walk from Lime Street Station.
In the evening managed to watch the Eurovision Song Contest. It was as crazy and ridiculous as ever which is probably why I enjoy it so much. Of course the results are pretty irrelevant - it's all a matter of politics and this is proved year after year. The strange thing is very often the best song does rise to the top of the barrel, proving that there is some justice. Can't say I was greatly enamoured by the winning Swedish entry, however. My favourite was the song from Iceland which had a prog rock feel to it but which did pretty badly. But not as badly as our Englebert, however, which just goes to proved that putting a 76 year old in as our entry was a mistake. I always thought that would be the case but I did feel a tad sorry for the man as our entry this year wasn't a bad song and certainly deserved to come higher than 25th out of 26th.
With 42 countries voting, it looked as if the contest would go on all night. In the end it was a landslide victory for Sweden. As for the Hump. Well his performance was poor. His voice at times was off key and he just didn't make the high octane end notes. But you have to feel sorry for the guy who was well beaten by a bunch of Russian Grannies with a novelty song and, even worse, by the talentless muppets Jedward whose only claim to fame is the fact they have silly hairstyles, are identical twins and have a total inability to sing. Ireland have been taking the mickey for years by using idiots like these and also a puppet a few years ago.
Seems nowadays there are countries deliberately trying not to win on the grounds of the cost of staging the event the following year. If this is so one has to ask just why they enter in the first place. Everyone votes for their neighbours. So why don't they just do away with the songs altogether and just get countries to vote on thin air? You would pretty much get the same result and we would still come in the bottom three.
Is it simply because nobody likes us or are our songs really that bad? I think it's a bit of both. You have to say that by the law of averages we should still have scored many more points. Yes counties will give their top awards to their neighbours or allies but there was still plenty of points lower down that would have given us a better placing. What most of the juries were saying was quite simply "we don't like Englebert, we don't like the song and we aren't even going to give it a single point." At least with 42 countries voting the chances of any entry receiving the legendary nul point is now fairly remote. It would have to be a real dog of an entry to achieve that - something like this year's entry from Turkey which somehow did ridiculously well despite being a heap of tripe.
Most of the real cringing moments come with the voting, however, with presenters from all over the world smarming their way through everything whilst you just want to shout at the TV "hurry up you moron I want to go to bed." The Finnish presenter took things to a new high (or should it be low) this year by appearing dressed as a death metal troll. He looked and acted plainly ridiculous and the only person he would have entertained would have been himself. I'm not sure who thinks these ideas up but they are obviously a few Euros short of a wage packet. Still we look forward to next year when once again the nation that brought rock/pop music to the world (along with the USA of course) will again be ignored irrespective of whether our song is good, bad or indifferent. perhaps we should employ Jedward.
Liverpool has the feel of a very compact city with everything in the centre in comfortable walking distance and everything pretty much as we remembered from two years ago - our last visit.
The weather helped today as it was warm and sunny and Albert Dock shimmered in the haze. Our apartment is abut 10 minutes' walk from Lime Street Station.
In the evening managed to watch the Eurovision Song Contest. It was as crazy and ridiculous as ever which is probably why I enjoy it so much. Of course the results are pretty irrelevant - it's all a matter of politics and this is proved year after year. The strange thing is very often the best song does rise to the top of the barrel, proving that there is some justice. Can't say I was greatly enamoured by the winning Swedish entry, however. My favourite was the song from Iceland which had a prog rock feel to it but which did pretty badly. But not as badly as our Englebert, however, which just goes to proved that putting a 76 year old in as our entry was a mistake. I always thought that would be the case but I did feel a tad sorry for the man as our entry this year wasn't a bad song and certainly deserved to come higher than 25th out of 26th.
With 42 countries voting, it looked as if the contest would go on all night. In the end it was a landslide victory for Sweden. As for the Hump. Well his performance was poor. His voice at times was off key and he just didn't make the high octane end notes. But you have to feel sorry for the guy who was well beaten by a bunch of Russian Grannies with a novelty song and, even worse, by the talentless muppets Jedward whose only claim to fame is the fact they have silly hairstyles, are identical twins and have a total inability to sing. Ireland have been taking the mickey for years by using idiots like these and also a puppet a few years ago.
Seems nowadays there are countries deliberately trying not to win on the grounds of the cost of staging the event the following year. If this is so one has to ask just why they enter in the first place. Everyone votes for their neighbours. So why don't they just do away with the songs altogether and just get countries to vote on thin air? You would pretty much get the same result and we would still come in the bottom three.
Is it simply because nobody likes us or are our songs really that bad? I think it's a bit of both. You have to say that by the law of averages we should still have scored many more points. Yes counties will give their top awards to their neighbours or allies but there was still plenty of points lower down that would have given us a better placing. What most of the juries were saying was quite simply "we don't like Englebert, we don't like the song and we aren't even going to give it a single point." At least with 42 countries voting the chances of any entry receiving the legendary nul point is now fairly remote. It would have to be a real dog of an entry to achieve that - something like this year's entry from Turkey which somehow did ridiculously well despite being a heap of tripe.
Most of the real cringing moments come with the voting, however, with presenters from all over the world smarming their way through everything whilst you just want to shout at the TV "hurry up you moron I want to go to bed." The Finnish presenter took things to a new high (or should it be low) this year by appearing dressed as a death metal troll. He looked and acted plainly ridiculous and the only person he would have entertained would have been himself. I'm not sure who thinks these ideas up but they are obviously a few Euros short of a wage packet. Still we look forward to next year when once again the nation that brought rock/pop music to the world (along with the USA of course) will again be ignored irrespective of whether our song is good, bad or indifferent. perhaps we should employ Jedward.
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