Elsewhere in Eurovisionia …

AySel, Ruslana and Arash during the Eurovision Song Contest 2009
AySel, Ruslana and Arash during the Eurovision Song Contest 2009

… we have hosts, apparently! And innovatively, it’s one pair for the semis and a different pair for the final. According to eurovision.tv:

London-based model Natalia Vodyanova and Russian TV-presenter Andrey Malakhov will host the two Semi-Finals of the upcoming contest, on the 12th and 14th of May. The Final on the 16th of May will be hosted by Russia’s 2000 Eurovision Song Contest contestant Alsou and media personality Ivan Urgant.

So there you go. I hope that the girls have been practicing high-pitched shouting while the gents have been putting the requisite work into “reading slightly lame jokes off an autocue woodenly”. That kind of amazing attributes aren’t developed overnight; they need a lot of time to get them absolutely right.

I also read that the EBU are no more keen on people recording rehearsal videos off monitors this year than they were last, so the AKOE vids we posted this morning are no longer active. Seems fair enough to me – knowing every cut and close-up now would be like opening your Christmas presents in November, and who wants to be doing that?