May
14
Category: 
|BBC NEWS | ‘The worst show in living memory’
Author Tim Moore wrote a book, Nul Points, about acts which failed to score at the Eurovision Song Contest.
He told the BBC News website what he thought of this year’s competition, won by Serbian singer Marija Serifovic, and particularly the performance of UK quartet Scooch, who finished joint 22nd out of 24.I actually thought Flying the Flag by Scooch was a fine song in the true tradition of Eurovision.Yes, it was a bit cheesy, but it was frothy, bubble-gum stuff.I thought it had all the ingredients for a good Eurovision song - but perhaps a good Eurovision song in 1996, and that was probably where we went a little bit wrong.Generally speaking over the past few years, the big four - the UK, France, Spain and Germany - have been right down at the bottom at the end so this was not unexpected. But I think it deserved to do much better than it did.The only act to score fewer points than Scooch was Ireland’s Dervish
Scooch had a catchy tune, but all the other ones tended to blend into a big, forgettable morass of power-ballads and soft rock.Really it was dreadful - I thought it was the worst Eurovision in living memory, frankly.
The chap has a point. While some journalists are trying to blame everything on Scooch themselves, I think the journalists should perhaps take a long hard look at those members of the British public who voted for Scooch to represent this country in Europe when they could have been voting for Hawkins and Brown. The fact is that the rest of Europe seems to have realised that there’s more to a song contest than outright cheese.
As for the oft-repeated suggestion that This voting for neighbours is a nonsense now. You could sit there last night and you knew who they were going to give the 12 points to, every single time
, it would be fairer to recognise that the Czech Republic is not Montenegro’s neighbour. Nor does Russia have a border with Serbia. It is just ever so plausible that the Slavs recognise the vocal patterns of other slavonic languages and vote accordingly.
Cyprus, however, has no excuse. They will give Greece 12 points for at least the next twenty years.
