A song for Europe

Last night we had the "pleasure" of watching the Eurovision Songquest 2006. I thought I'd just flick it on while we did the dishes, for a bit of laugh. I also hoped to catch the French entry, who seemed to have a fairly good song. However, we quickly got drawn in to this bizarre showcase of low to average talent. If these were the best acts that each country could come up with, then European music is in trouble! Most acts seemed to be a pretty girl or boy bopping around on stage while singing a bad pop song. So far, so average. Then Lithuania's group came on stage. The French commentator announced that Lithuania had come last in the previous competition, and it seemed like they had decided to take a different approach this time. The group's song was called "We are the winners", and pretty much just had two lines repeated over and over again in kind of a football anthem - "We are the winners of Eurovision. Vote for the winners of Eurovision." You had to admire their courage! Then Finland's group came on stage to sing "monster hard rock", according to the commentator. Monster? Well, the group all had impressive makeup and prosthetics on to look like monsters. It was a homage to bad 80s rock but a refreshing change to the bubblegum pop songs that the rest of the contestants had been singing. The group had a lot of stage presence and were memorable if nothing else. When they finished, the two French commentators laughed and said, "Well that's not the way to win Eurovision." They were impatient for the French singer to come on and show the rest of them how it should be done. The French girl was actually quite good, with an OK song. The trouble was, she didn't show much leg compared to the rest of the contestants (fairly important as it turns out), and didn't bop around on stage, but the French commentators were confident that she would at least get in the top 5. By this stage we "had" to stick around to find out the results, which are done by phone vote. There were 24 countries in the final but almost all countries in Europe get to vote. The only rule is you can't vote for your own country. Depending on the phone vote, each country then allocates 1-7 points to seven countries, then gives one country 8 points, one 10 points and one 12 points. Amazingly enough, Finland quickly shot to the lead, with Lithuania not too far behind, much to the French commentators' amazement. They consoled themselves by saying that there were still heaps of countries to go and anything could change. However, by the time half of the countries had given their results, Finland was still way in front and France had no points. Each time a country gave more than 8 points to Finland, the commentators would interject with "Oh no, this can't be happening."
They were still hopeful, though, that their neighbours would support them. Unfortunately, neither Belgium, Germany, Spain or Switzerland gave any points to France (and gave lots to Finland or Lithuania!), much to the commentators' annoyance. The commentators became more and more desperate sounding the more the voting went on. France eventually got 5 points, some from Monaco and some from Armenia, but the commentators kept referring to Belgium's "betrayal". Finland, as you may have guessed, won the competition, and Lithuania came 6th. I guess Europe was ready for something different! All in all, the best piece of unintentional comedy and drama we've seen for a while.