Phil: They need to have kept the receipt in case they’re after a refund in a few days time. It is a total, utter and complete mess and it is not worth the silly odds that have been touted about this one. He is having trouble singing his own song, he does something very strange at the beginning of the song in a crouching stylee and it looks totally staged and unnatural you feel as though it has been choreographed within an inch of its life and then it falls the final inch.
It has the look of a fallen Idol about it and it had better be good Vocally in the remaining rehearsals and in the Semi on Tuesday otherwise it is going to fail badly. For the administrivia amongst you – the ladder has gone, but Plushenko stays. On this Performance, it’s struggling and needs resuscitation quickly.
Nick: he ladder’s gone. There is no ladder. Aucune échelle, no hay escala, keine Strichleiter. This hasn’t done any harm whatever, in fact it’s a positive benefit.
Skatey Bloke and Stradivari Bloke are still in place, and whilst they get some nice face time, they’re relatively minor parts of the show. It’s all about Dima now. Lots of singing straight into the camera. Likable or slightly icky? Writhing around the floor like a loon-ball or putting every ounce of movement and emotion into the show? Basically, Europe, what I want to know is this: would you invite him to your party?
I can see, for the first time, how it could, could, hypothetically, theoretically, and yet still without prejudice, sucker enough people into voting for him to do very very well. To win the whole contest though… hmm. Hard to say, and personally I can’t see it. He’ll do better than Anna Vissi did in 2006, and that’s as much as I’m going to predict. There may be no monster masks this year, but there are plenty of people jumping out of washing baskets, standing on top of light boxes, holding up pictures of cheese and sticking their arms up a puppet turkey’s arse.
Franko: Unlike Phil I’m going to look at this objectively and give a calm, sane assessment. As predicted, gone is the ladder which was a bit too children’s telly for my liking and now the emphasis as Nick so rightly pointed out is much more on Dima himself which can only be an advantage. Lots of looking into the camera and emoting. The ice skater and the violin player still get in on the action but they don’t totally get in the way as much as they did before. In short it’s effective and likely to attract votes by the truckload. It’s not a winner though for my money because the song isn’t as catchy as his last one and only the draw is likely to see him fair better than Anna Vissi did a couple of years ago when she tried the same sort of over the top performance to lesser effect. It does as well have the disadvantage that after much wrangling there will be an ad break before now. Everybody has been in up in arms about the fact that it was a big conspiracy to end the chances of Greece winning, but quite frankly Greece has never been in the running and Russia is hanging in their by the tip of the blades on it’s ice skates on this evidence.
Roy: I’m sitting somewhere in between the three stools of my On-U Sound Sistem collegues. I’m not glad the ladder’s gone, but only because I thought its inclusion would lessen his appeal and up the guffaw ratio.
But for me this was an over-mannered and twitchy to the extreme. He was hard enough work last time, but now he’s gorn all rock-star-in-me-head, and for me it was pretty difficult to watch. Come Tuesday it’s entirely down to whether the folks back home think, ooh hello, here’s a boy who know’s how to perform the bejabers out of a song, or, who the heck does this posturing nit wit think he is. I favour the latter – but they like their bombastic gestures out this end of the continent, so that could just drag him over the line.
Not remotely convinced, but it’s the hardest of hard ones to call.