It's occured to me that since the Eurovision final on Saturday night, I haven't actually written about it. Of course that wouldn't really be a problem, except I've written about the semi final so it would be wrong to leave it at that.

So, just to sum up what happen in Helsinki, Finland, the United Kingdom was crap. No sitting on the fence here. Just plain crap, although it was marginally less crap than when we came last. This year we came second from last with a whoping 19 points - 6 less than last year!

There wasn't really anything wrong with the performance other than a microphone or two sounded a little quiet, and the singing could have been a little stronger. The problem was the dominant style of music this year was not the cheesy pop of old. And to make matters worse, the other country that did REALLY cheesy pop was the Ukraine who put on an excellent and visually memorable performance right before our song which I would imagine meant it got overlooked slightly.

Anyway, Charlie came over for an Indian meal whilst the show was on, and this year we scored each act using a scoresheet from the BBC website, with Charlie, Kate and myself each allocating a score of 1-4 for each of the categories: song, performance, dance routine and outfit. So once we'd allocated our points, each category would have a score out of 12 which I would then add up to give that country a score out of 48.

Using this system, we came up with the following for the top 10:

01= Sweden (36pts)
01= Germany (36pts)
02. Ukraine (35pts)
03. United Kingdom (32pts)
04= Belarus (31pts)
04= Finland (31pts)
04= Turkey (31pts)
05= Moldova (30pts)
05= Georgia (30pts)
05= Greece (30pts)
06. Russia (29pts)
07= FYR Macedonia (28pts)
07= Ireland (28pts)
08. Latvia (27pts)
09. France (26pts)
10. Hungary (23pts)

Quite a close run thing really. We decided to vote for Sweden once the songs had been recapped due to it being a better tune than Germany. Our top 10 however was completely different to what was announced by the end of the evening:

01. Serbia (268pts)
02. Ukraine (235pts)
03. Russia (207pts)
04. Turkey (163pts)
05. Bulgaria (157pts)
06. Belarus (145pts)
07. Greece (139pts)
08. Armenia (138pts)
09. Hungary (128pts)
10. Moldova (109pts)

Well we got Turkey right at number 4!

The results are certainly dominated by those countries which fall into the Eastern block. You have to ask the question now whether any of the western nations will come close to winning the contest again, let alone the UK.

Personally, I think it might be time to reform the way the contest is run to make it a little more fair and I have a rather simple solution. All songs are sung in the same language, which would be chosen by a draw each year but must be different to that of the previous 3 years so that no one language can dominate the contest. Each song is performed, but it is not announced which country that performance is for until after the vote has closed. Then each country announces the vote as is done now, but as a simple top 10. Non of this 7pts, 8pts, 10pts, 12pts rubbish which I've never really understood the purpose of.

This sort of system would make political voting more difficult and limit runaway lead scores whilst ensuring small countries can issue their scores on an equal footing with the larger countries.

Of course it would mean that the song for each country would have to be kept secret until the performance which would mean a change to the way the UK at least chooses it's song. A panel would need to be appointed to choose rather than a televised phone in poll, but that could well mean that a better quality of song goes through to the contest rather than the rubbish which we've had lately.

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