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Well, as has been noted on more than one occasion (here, and here), there are a few followers round the globe for the annual fest of music that is the Eurovision Song Contest.
It has to be said that the pace being kept up this year is pretty relentless - virtually no gaps between songs, and in under an hour we’ve had 12 countries; where before you have tended to have meandering little travelogue films they are running 15-20 second animations showing CGI versions of buildings and monuments.
Because they don’t show ads, viewers of the BBC are now being treated to what Graham Norton has just described as a slightly ironic film skit by the Russian TV channel of a “humorous” encounter between a presenter and the police (who have come in for criticism for their treatment of Eurovision-related events today).
Moldova are now being very energetic, so I will let anyone else chip in…

…just please don’t post the winner, as Irene won’t be watching it in Australia until tomorrow!

Why is it now mainly average 'disco' music songs fronted by very pretty models? And they're all singing in English! It's a far cry from the Oom-pah-pah, Boom-bang-a-bang days of yore. The good old days ;)

Just watched the UK entry. Great voice, but I hope I never hear that song again in my life. Really drab.

I'm missing Mr Wogan, but I must say Graham Norton's doing a fine job. He's much better than I thought he would be.

I’m the opposite way round on that - can’t say that the song was great, but I thought her voice (and her diction!!!) were horrible… “Mah tam na-ee-owww”!

Loved Moldova!

Still, as you say, it needed a “Hi-de-noodle-bing-bang!” type song to make it a real Eurovision!

It was powerful though, wasn't it? And a phenomenal amount of vibrato. I must admit, my cat left the room in a hurry...

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I miss the old Eurovision when the participants used to sing in their native language and when the songs were a bit more traditional.

Of this year's semi-final entries, I really enjoyed Estonia's offering, as well as Moldova's and Portugal's. Ireland's early exit was a surprise to me.

Can't wait for this evening's final ...

How ironic, hehe.

Congratulations to Norway. My favourite, the Estonian entry, only came sixth. :'-(

P.S. Estonia is currently ranked third on 'SBS's Official Unofficial Scorecard'.

I agree entirely, but sadly therein lies a problem. Whenever anybody produced their bohdran and sackbut to sing in their own tradition, pundits like Terry Wogan ridicule it to the point of extinction; why it shouldn’t be acceptable
The UK takes it even further in the wrong direction by peddling nothing but low-rent pop chart fodder, without any national identity or feeling.
There was a revealing piece in The Independent this week, about Johnny Hallyday. The basic precept of this article appears to be that M. Hallyday can’t be any good really, because he hasn’t ever been successful in Britain or America - that success in the Francophone world isn’t really anything at all. I’m afraid that until that sort of attitude can be changed, the UK will continue to lose…

I understand that to stop the bloc voting they revamped the voting process, so that half of the votes were decided by a panel. It didn't make a lot of difference, as far as I could tell from some country's votes, even if Norway were outright winners.

I'm not really sure what they can do to avert the banal cheesy pop though. From the UK's perspective, it's always been a bit of a joke. The UK haven't really needed to prove themselves musically (with a pedigree of successful pop bands over the years). I can understand why it would be far more important to countries like Luxembourg, or the new batch of countries from eastern Europe. As for Terry Wogan, I think he simply played along with the stereotype, for better or worse, so there was a lot of mickey-taking and irreverent humour. That's part of what I like about it actually!

The UK hasn't got over the stigma of becoming one of the few countries to receive 'nul points' a few years back (incidentally, Norway have achieved this milestone 4 times!) I think the UK would probably pick up a few more points by adding some folky-type fiddles and bagpipes to the usual pop-cheese. And maybe stick the odd "Hi-de-noodle-bing-a-bang", just for old times sake :-)

I think that the answer then is that we should have Richard Stilgoe and not Andrew Lloyd Webber write the song (they have worked together on Starlight Express and The Phantom of the Opera, so I presume that Graham Norton or whoever just got confused when they looked up the number).
Anyway, not only is he a capable tunesmith, he once performed a remarkable pastiche of a Eurovision song by singing the instructions from a Swedish telephone box (along the lines of “Man kan höra guten pip-pip!”, or something).