22/05/06 Eurovision Gloom

These are desperate times for the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest.
The onset of public votes has cast us to a Eurovision wilderness from which we cannot escape unless the voting rules are changed.
This is extremely unlikely to happen.
Charging voters premium phone rates ensures that the competition now pays for itself in telecom revenue.
Reverting to the old jury system of allocating points would now be seen as a classic case of turkeys voting for an early Christmas.
This is a desperate, desperate situation.
It is really galling that Tony Blair should choose this time of Eurovision crisis, of all times, to take a nice impromptu holiday in Baghdad and swan about with the newly elected Iraqi Prime Minister.
Tony has taken his eye off the ball, and I fear that he may live to regret this flagrant dereliction of duty.
This is a clear failure of prioritisation.
Can't he see the people are suffering?
I noticed that the Footsie crashed further down this morning.
I suspect that this is entirely related to the weekend song contest trauma.
In the contest itself, Dan Sampson's brilliant schoolgirl/seedy taxi driver rap was absolutely nowhere in the voting.
Dan cut an abject figure at the end.
Even though he had lived up to his pre-show vow that he would give his performance "A thousand and fifty percent!"...it sadly just wasn't enough.
Even giving it two thousand percent probably wouldn't have been enough either.
We're out on a limb. We have no mates to vote for us.
All the Balkan countries vote for each other, (which surprises me as they also go in for a bit of neighbourly genocide every so often). All the former Soviet Union countries vote for each other. Greece and Cyprus give each other douze points etc etc
We get no geo-political Eurovision favours at all.
What can we do?
One hope could be to invite "UK friendly" countries to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest.
USA for example.
Well yes, ok, you're right...the USA isn't in Europe, but neither is Israel or Russia or Ukraine etc etc
Perhaps, each state of America could each have a separate song and a separate vote.
Now we might be in with a shout! (bad news for France though)
We could also invite the Falkland Islands to participate?
Gibraltar?
Canada? (not the French speaking bits though)
Isle of Man?
This would push the entrant numbers up to about 150, so the show would probably have to start on the Friday night and go on all day, leaving 8 hours for the voting.
And none of this "only giving the last 3 votes for each country" and displaying all the lower marks automatically.
Let's go back to each vote being delivered painfully slowly in French and English.
Come on, don't mess with tradition.
I've decided I want to go to Lithuania on holiday as they are obviously the funniest people on the planet.
They came up with the hilarious concept of a group of car salesmen singing a song
beginning "We are the winners, We are the winners, We are the winners of Eurovision".
What a cheeky idea which may well have won the prize if the song itself wasn't so irretrievably shite.
In Big Brother, Shabaz seems to be doing for Gay Scottish Pakistanis what the Titanic did for the Pleasure Cruises Industry.
This isn't just car crash viewing, it's a multiple motorway pile-up involving 351 vehicles.
It's so bad, that I just can't help looking.
Please somebody charter a helicopter gunship and take him out in the garden...