Final Prediction

There are only minutes to go until the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest final begins. It is one of the most open contests for years but I'm going to have a go at predicting the outcome. Here we go:

1st Russia
2nd Greece
3rd Ukraine
4th Serbia
5th Armenia
6th Sweden
7th Finland
8th Portugal
9th Georgia
10th Turkey

Spain could surprise us somewhere in the top 10 but I think they'll suffer a similar fate to Dustin The Turkey. I knew Russia, Greece, Ukraine, Serbia and Sweden would do well, even before they'd selected their entries. They always bring quality entries to the contest and I don't know where we'd be without them.

The final running order

1. Romania
2. United Kingdom
3. Albania
4. Germany
5. Armenia
6. Bosnia and Herzegovina
7. Israel
8. Finland
9. Croatia
10. Poland
11. Iceland
12. Turkey
13. Portugal
14. Latvia
15. Sweden
16. Denmark
17. Georgia
18. Ukraine
19. France
20. Azerbaijan
21. Greece
22. Spain
23. Serbia
24. Russia
25. Norway

You can watch a playlist of all the songs in the final below or at http://www.youtube.com/loveeurovision

Second semi final surprises

After correctly predicting 9 out of the 10 qualifiers from the 1st semi final (Finland was the only one I missed) I knew the second semi final was going to be much harder. In the end I only got 5 out of 10. The countries I chose that didn't make it were Bulgaria, Belarus, FYROM, Switzerland and Hungary.

I never in my wildest dreams expected Denmark and Iceland to qualify. We'll see when the results are revealed on Saturday evening where those points came from.

The 10 qualifiers from the second semi final were:

Iceland
Sweden
Turkey
Denmark
Ukraine
Croatia
Latvia
Portugal
Georgia
Albania

First semi final predictions!

Last year I managed to predict 8 of the top 10 in the semi final. This year the task seems much harder but I am going to go one better and also predict their positions! Here we go:

1. Russia
2. Greece
3. Armenia
4. Romania
5. Israel
6. Bosnia
7. Azerbaijan
8. Poland
9. Norway
10. Belgium

I'm still not sure about Ireland, it may well qualify but my prediction is 11th place.

UK Eurovision preview party

The Scala was packed out for the Eurovision preview party by nationalities from all over Europe (but mainly Scandanavia).

Photos. 1. Isis Gee. 2. Bosnia. 3. Andy Abraham talks to Paddy but doesn't sing. 4. Paul Oskar. 5. Ani Lorak's dancers get them out for the boys.












Video: Ani Lorak previewing the Ukraine's entry 'Shady Lady'

What's the point of 'The Big 4?'

Ok so France, Germany, Spain and the UK pay the most into the EBU and therefore pick up a lot of the cost of staging Eurovision each year but should that guarantee them automatic qualification to the final? The only argument I can see for this is that if they all failed to qualify a few years in a row it might provoke them to pull out of Eurovision and put the whole thing in jeapordy. In practice however it just seems to make them all lazy with the quality of songs they enter each year.

Today France's entry was announced. Sebastien Tellier will be representing France with 'Divine,' the first French entry to be sung entirely in English. That's about the most exiting thing about the song. It's boring, pure and simple.

You can listen to Divine on Sebastien's Myspace here.

Germany chose their entry on Thursday. 'Disappear' by No Angels could be a good song but it doesn't go anywhere, it's just boring.



'Even If' by Andy Abraham is a rather inoffensive song but it just seems more suited to 1995 than 2008. Again it goes around in circles and doesn't really go anywhere. The UK will once again be shocked by their placing at the bottom end of the scoreboard and blame it on 'the war' or block-voting by eastern Europe.



Spain have been very innovative this year in using Myspace to select some of the finalists for their national final. They obviously didn't trust it too much as they reserved 5 places in the final for entries chosen by a jury. It's probably a good job too as some good songs were pushed out of the public top 5 by various bizarre novelty songs. Perhaps the best song to come through the public voting on Myspace and make it to the Spanish national final is 'La Revolucion Sexual' by La Casa Azul. They have a slight problem though, how to edit it down from 4 1/2 minutes to under 3. I think it is the best song of The Big 4 and I hope it wins the Spanish final on Saturday.

Kari Tapio - my Finnish favourite

Now this may not have been to everyone's taste and perhaps I'm getting old but I really liked this song and I think it would definitely have attracted the grey vote if it had made it through.