Well Scooch, what happened?
Unsurprisingly, not much.
One of the highlights of the weekend was obviously Eurovision 2007.
It was with excitement that we journeyed to the annual South Woodham Ferrers Eurovision party, and joined our seven fellow Eurovisioners for three hours of camp, colour, and costumes.
It’s been well reported what happened with the tactical voting, and that the UK were left out in the cold (appropriate as the contest was in Finland). But, did anyone think that the song itself might not have actually been very good? The stage show graphics were impressive though, but up against a lot of the more commercial-sounding entries, Scooch stood little chance of success.
Largely though, with the exception of Sweden and Germany, here on goodrichard, our ones to watch did well.
Alenka Gotar and her magic-light hand took Slovenia to 14th place, while Natalia Barbu fought her and Moldova’s corner to land a hefty punch and finish 10th. Silver clad drag Ukranian queen Verka Serdyuchka put on a very comical stage show, and bottom-slapped her way to second place, 33 points below Marija Serifovic from Serbia, who was the eventual winner. But, it was too close to call at one point, before the Serbian singer then slowly edged ahead.
Serebro, the Russian girls did well (but not well enough – they were robbed), and bad ass spun their way to 3rd. If they would have had a more visual stage show, who knows what may have happened? It was still the best song of the night, though, but I do remember Verka Serdyuchka’s ‘Dancing – Lasha Tumbai’ being played lots at the South Woodham Ferrers post-mortem afterwards.
We all agreed that one entry which should have made the final but didn’t was the Cyprus dance-rock entry (surprisingly sung in French):
Quite catchy.
We kept scores all throughout the evening, and comparing the our points allocation with the eventual final scoreboard makes interesting reading.
Surprisingly, we placed Moldova first, with Georgia second. In reality, no amount of visionary dreaming could help Sopho climb higher than 12th. As it was, she just missed out on scoring an automatic place for her country in next year’s final. It was a good performance though with swordsmen and dancing, and once the song gets going, it sounds like a classic Bjork moment:
We secured Finland’s rocky offering from Hanna Pakarinen a third place, while the winning entry from Serbia made our fourth spot.
The Russian girl trio rounded out the top 5, some of the South Woodham sofa sitters not liking the Girls Aloud-a-like power pop sound. Unfortunately, nearly all of us didn’t think much of our guys and girls either, with Scooch sitting in 15th position, barely taxiing down the runway.
The rest of the official top five saw Turkey finish in fourth, just pipping the etheral and charged entry from Bulgaria. Quite different to our unofficial votes, I’m sure you’ll agree.
But, above all, we had fun, as I’m guessing the lucky audience did too in Helsinki.
Will we make the 1000-mile trek to Belgrade next year? Who knows.
But, even if we don’t, I’m looking forward to it already.
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