What are we here for again? Oh yes a festival of popular songing and tunes.
I wasn’t here for the first few, but my local spies tell me there was a reassuring amount of stamping and hand-waving from Bosnia, Austria confounded expectations and was actually really rather good, and three Dutch blokes stood on a stage and created a dull, cold mist pretending to be a song.
I did catch the 3JS press conference, and yes, I suspect that most of their middle names are Earnest. Nice enough chaps but quite quite dull.
I thankfully missed the Belgian run through, but still got caught by a screen showing their press conference. They ran through a squeaky cover of that Sandra Kim song, before plooping through their hit for what seemed like a month. By the look of them one suspects they met at bible club and a provincial catering college.
Slovakia was a little more uptempo than I’d expected, and came across reasonably nicely. They do affect the Christina Ricci lollypop head look though, so I suspect that they could do with a few big dinners otherwise they’ll be wilting under those big show lights.
Ukraine is having their first practice as I speak. The lass herself is a mass of towselled hair and glistening teeth, but the real showbiz here is the woman with the severe bob and dressed like Ming The Merciless in the background who we all thought was doing the washing up at first, but on closer inspection appears to be that lady who won Ukraine’s Got Talent doing instant sand art. A curious but interesting move indeed!
The true fun starts in a minute with the Moldovan hat boys – I’m whipping off down the front for that one!