Irelande, nul points

There is a theory going round my office that Ireland, having been nearly bankrupted by having to host the Eurovision song contest on no less than 13 occasions, have now opted to commit contest suicide by sending a song they know stands no chance of winning. Last year they were quite subtle about it by sending in an OK tune but cleverly having it sung by the one person in a country of musicians who was tone deaf. This year they decided to go the whole hog and send a puppet to shout a bunch of nonsense which worked absolutely perfectly as they didn't even make it to the finals. Well done chaps, Jamesons all round.

Mind you, given the standard of the entries this year I saw last night on the first semi final (Europe has gone through another mitosis so there are even more countries to accomodate) it could so easily have gone horribly wrong. We had three fat twats from some Baltic state shouting random words about food in some sort of post-modern ironic statement about the common agricultural policy (I had the "sing along" turned on so I could read the words you see), Finland bravely plugging away at the heavy metal angle thining "well it worked for Lordi" and Belgium returning to the path trod by the rather good Urban Trad's "Sanomi" and submitting a song in a completely made up language, regrettably failing to realise that Urban Trad only carried this off because the music was, you know, good. Oh and the Netherlands decided to justify the renaming of the capital city to "Islamsterdam" by sending something that sounded like every Turkish entry ever.

About the only thing that stood out was the Bosnian (I think, all those countries melt into a blob of balkan goo after half a bottle of Valpolicella) entry with an upbeat poppy number, sung well and with a bunch of ladies in wedding dresses knitting for some reason.

Apparently we've sent something that sounds like The Lighthouse Family on Mogadon. How can we fail.