It occurs to me, nearly one week on, that I haven't written about this year's Eurovision Song Contest; held in Moscow.

Sadly, since it's been a few days I don't think I'll be able to comment on perhaps some of the more obscure acts of the contest. Saying that however, I don't recall it being an overly bizarre event.

Perhaps I have just established some kind of mental block, eliminating the poor and shameful acts from my consciousness but I do believe that the Eurovision Song Contest is becoming more serious. Nations are taking it more seriously - and so are we in the UK. Or at least we did this year.

I'm very pleased to be able to write that we did very well in this competition. Every time I have reviewed the event in the past, I have had to make reference to the poor performance of the UK entry. This time however; thanks to Jade's performance and Andrew Lloyd Webber on the piano; our nation ranked 5th out of 25 countries.

In order to eliminate some of the political voting that has marred the contest for so many years, this time jury voting was introduced which accounted for 50% of a countries score. The other 50% still being made up by the public telephone vote. On the face of it, one might consider that this is why we did well and indeed it did help. Looking at an unofficial source of results however, shows that with only the telephone vote, our song would still have scored 7th. Yes the jury vote has helped us, but not by such a significant margin as one might imagine.

To me though, this result really does prove that by putting in a lot of effort in using a talented singer, known song-writer and heavy European marketing; we can still do well.

Now the mission is to do the same again next year. On the back of a good result, can we entice performers that are well known in Europe to get involved? It is important to build on what went well this year, and improve our weaker points. Then maybe (but just maybe) we will be hosting the Eurovision Song Contest.

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Tags: eurovision, music