like after a battle in the Third Crusade, but in reverse. Message boards are alight this morning with harsh words against the EBU for allowing the East to put forward better quality songs than their Western counterparts. The head of the EBU, Svante Stockselius is getting the brunt of mittel & nord Europa’s ire. The poor man is only doing his job as best he can. He can’t help it if the West sent Foo Foo Lamarr on downers (credit to Rob on that one), a papier mache gong, and Top Shop clearance mannequins. To my tiny mind only Andorra were hardish done by (and remember they were able to choose their peculiar position in the draw, so failure is down to them really). You could argue Edsilia was deffo good enough, but her song wasn’t.
So to recap the qualifiers are from far East to near East are:
Georgia, Turkey, Moldova, Bulgaria, Latvia, Belarus, FYROM, Serbia, Slovenia & Hungary.
Draw-wise, Slovenia, Hungary and Lithuania have been lumped together which doesn’t help either of my two adopted nations (boo hoo…and I woke up to find my mini Hungarian flags snapped…nurse the sellotape). Serbia (the most subdued performance) is on directly before Ukraine & the UK (neither subdued in any way). And Moldova is on last after Armenia, which can’t hurt its predicted 6th place from me.
I’m sad to report that the hall was by no means full last night. A whole swathe at the back was virtually desereted. God knows how the Finns managed that as the Senate Square for the free showing was packed out an hour before (conclusion, they must be tight).
Got the day off today, although might pop up to the press centre anyway (I’m getting quite enamoured with the place) and hopefully pick up my next wedge of freebies, and try to get lingering eye contact with Magdi again. This time sober and in Hungarian. Two final rehearsals today, and got tickets for the one at 9pm, but my esteemed colleague from M’cr is jetting in (hopefully not having something to suck on for landing), and he’d rather get drunk than use £120 worth of ticket. I don’t know, some people eh.
Dolly has asked which flag I will be sporting tomorrow. Well, I actually brought 4 with me, namely Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, and Bulgaria, never for one minute thinking all four would still be in the contest right now. So I have a choice of sorts, although even a circumspect browse through my main site will tell you that the Lithuanian flag will be on display for the majority of Saturday. Add my mini Hungarian and I’m awash with Eastern promise.
And a mention in despatches for the person responsible for supply as well as backstage operations in this blog empire. A certain MU, who I’ve got to butter up or he could pull the plug.
Back to the build up. See ya.
Enjoy tomorrow and have a ball!. Tell Kev to behave himself. Will be watching it flying the flag for Germany.
Comment by Dolly 05.11.07 @ 5:11 pm