Eurovision 2019

Yesterday saw the most fabulous Caturday night of the year as mannys once again held their Eurovision Singing Competition. We were all very excited cats here, but then the actual competition turned out to be well below the usual standard. Not universally though - the two campest and most colourful entries were saved until last, these being from Australia and Notorious Eurovision Cheats Spain.

Plus the Iceland entry was... certainly something.

On top of that, there were a couple of songs I liked, including the one from Switzerland.

But my favourite was Norway's entry, perhaps helped by their costumes reminding me of Blakes 7 - look at the mannys to the left and right and it's easy to imagine Avon dressed like that.

The biggest disappointment for us cats was not in the songs (we loved all of them really!) but in the voting. They changed the system a few years ago after a competition where the winner got such an early lead that it was clear they had won well before all the votes had been cast.

The way it works these days is that we spend ages watching all the countries of Eurovision taking turns to give their votes (and there are 41 of them so this is often a three sleeps event for cats), but then they render it a big waste of time by the second stage of voting, where great big blocks of seemingly arbitrary votes that have been cast by mannys using their 'phones are given out.

I don't doubt that these votes are being assigned fairly, but the process is completely opaque to viewers so they may as well be entirely random, and the only advantage (if you can call it that, mew) to using this system is that it manufactures tension when the final set of votes are read out, which the presenters try to milk like Greg Wallace announcing who has won a Masterchef programme... only the live broadcast nature of Eurovision makes it look like the presenters don't know what they're doing.