There's still more to vote on!

Once we had completed our look at those who were wronged by the rules of ESC, it was time to move on to something else, we had really got the bit between our teeth now!

The passage of time means that I can no longer remember the exact order that these little contests appeared on Digital Spy, but the next one I will talk about is the National Final rejects , which was run by marrakech.

Here we had a chance to submit any song that didn't make it to ESC from any country and any year. The choices were endless, but as we thought, Melodifestivalen was very well represented. I loved this contest, out of the 19 offerings, there were 8 that I didn't know and had great fun in getting familiar with. Voting was in the usual Eurovision style, 12, 10, 8, 7 etc and the results were as follows:

01ST PLACE - 117 POINTS gottago - Sweden 2009 // Alcazar "Stay The Night"
02ND PLACE - 109 POINTS BigBmad - Sweden 2008 // BWO "Lay Your Love One Me"
3rd - 91 points Pepsi-max kid - Sweden 2010 // Eric Saade "Manboy"
04th place - 84 points marrakech - Slovenia 2006 // Sasa Lendero "Mandoline"
05th place - 74 points big bro geek - Norway 2010 // Venke Knutson "Jealous 'Cause I Love You"
06th place - 71 points. Only_you - United Kingdom 2007 // Cyndi "I'll Leave My Heart"
07th place - 65 points 9ct mould - Ireland 2008 // Leona Daly "Not Crazy After All"
08th place - 62 points ShadyNathan - Spain 2010 // Coral Segovia "En Una Vida"
09th place - 61 points Chickens Hit - Denmark 2010 // Bryan Rice "Breathing"
10th place - 56 points BBAnne - Sweden 2008 // Rongedal "Just A Minute"
11th Place - 54 points ValerianForrest - Estonia 2009 // Laura "Destiny"
12th place - 53 points. breadsticks.roc - Ukraine 2010 // Zlata Ognevich "Tiny Island"
13th place - 51 points. Drew Peacock - United Kingdom 1976 // Polly Brown "Do You Believe In Love At First Sight?"
14th Place - 38 Points wombatofludham - United Kingdom 1962 // Donna Douglas "Message In A Bottle"
15th Place - 29 points. portugal - Netherlands 1990 // Shift "Helemaal"
16th Place - 27th kmmk17 - Russia 2010 // Aleksandr Panajotov "Maya Showtime"
17th Place - 26 points Cherry7Up - Ireland 2003 // Lisa Bresnan "I'll Still Be Right Here"
18th Place - 18 points Pdm1987 - Belgium 2008 // Femme Fatale "Decadence"
19th Place - 16 points EuroChris - Finland 2009 // KWAN "10000 Light Years"

I personally fell in love with Lisa Bresnan from Ireland 2003, and Polly Brown from 1976 (which I have been hearing in all sorts of random places ever since!

Digital Spy Gets Competitive!

So now, all we have to look forward to in the Eurovision off season is acres of wasteland, snippets of rumours, some true, some laughable (thanks for those, oikotimes..) and a whole bunch of nothing until Switzerland announce their entry on December 11th and Albania chose their song on Christmas Day (You never knew Jesus was a Eurovision fan?!)

A bunch of us on Digital Spy http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=1351266 were just talking about the shocker that was the departure of Sweden in the second semi, and we then got to thinking about the other travesties over the years.

What better way to put right some old wrongs than through the medium of Eurovision voting!

We took each year individually, and voted on the three songs of those non qualifiers that we believed should have made an appearance in the final .... from these preliminary votes, we got the following qualifiers:

2004:

1st: ESTONIA (10)

2nd: DENMARK (8)
3rd: ANDORRA (8)

2005:

1st: ICELAND (15)
2nd: MONACO (14)
3rd: SLOVENIA (9)

2006:

1st: BELGIUM (17)
2nd: ESTONIA (12)
3rd: ICELAND (10)

2007:

1st: CYPRUS (10)
2nd: NETHERLANDS (9)
3rd: MALTA (8)

2008:

1st: SWITZERLAND (13)
2nd: MALTA (8)
3rd: NETHERLANDS (7)

2009:

1st: MONTENEGRO (12)
2nd: SWITZERLAND (10)
3rd: CYPRUS (6

2010:

1st: SWEDEN (12)
2nd: FINLAND (10)
3rd: NETHERLANDS (8)

This process in itself was fraught with troubles - anyone who knows me knows that I adore Anzej Dezan from Slovenia, and always felt that his exclusion from the 2006 final was the worst thing - and then he only came fourth in the running in my own forum!! Shocking stuff ....

The numbers in brackets above by the way, are the number of votes received from all forum members - you can see that Kate Ryan from Belgium in 2006 and Selma from Iceland in 2005 were really popular, Paolo Meneguzzi from Switzerland 2008 also (he winked at me personally during his semi final, I clearly put him off his game that night!)

The songs above then went forward to a grand final, run by our lovely 9ct mould - where all 21 were voted on my DS FM's to find the biggest travesty in the contest to date ... and here are the final scores:

1^st Anna Bergendahl "This Is My Life" 124pts

2^nd Kate Ryan "Je T'adore" 108pts

3^rd Andrea Demirović "Just Get Out Of My Life" 99pts
4^th Lovebugs "The Highest Heights" 98pts

5^th Paolo Meneguzzi "Era Stupendo" 93pts

6^th Olivia Lewis "Vertigo" 68pts

7^th Kuunkuiskaajat "Työlki Ellää" 68pts
8^th Selma "If I Had Your Love" 66pts

9^th Evridiki "Comme Ci, Comme Ça" 64pts
10^th Sylvia Night "Congratulations" 64pts

11th: Sieneke - "Ik Ben Verliefd (Sha-la-lie)" 59 points
12th: Lise Darly - "Tout De Moi" 58 points
13th: Edsilia Rombley - "On Top Of The World" 48 points
14th: Christina Metaxa - "Firefly" 45 points
15th: Omar Naber - "Stop" 40 points
16th: Hind - "Your Heart Belongs To Me" 40
17th: Sandra Oxenryd - "Through My Window" 37 points
18th: Neiokõsõ - "Tii" 33 points
19th: Marta Roure - "Jugarem A Estimar-nos" 28 points

20th: Morena - "Vodka" 28 points (from 8 voters)
21st: Thomas Thordarson - "Shame On You" 8 points

Just as we had always thought then - Anna Bergandahl was robbed on 27th May 2010!

By the time I next looked....

Eurovision had happened!

The build up is sometimes more than the equal parts of the night itself, and the dramas and tantrums of the preceding few days left me drained (and clearly very susceptible to alcohol!)

The first semi final on Tuesday kind of went to form in my eyes, the only shock non-qualifier being Kuunkuiskajat for Finland who put in an amazingly upbeat performance that knocks the socks off their NF winning one. I was sorry to see them go. There was a bit of bleating about Malta not making it, but there couldn't really be any argument about those who did go through (although the boo's in the auditorium for Russia's qualification were loud, in my mind they were not warranted. So there.)

Semi-final 2 was a different beast altogether. There were at least 12 songs that deserved a place in the final, so the mathematics was always going to win out in the end. And it did. Goodbye and thank you to Lithuania, Croatia, and, the one that had the crowd gasping, and a small blonde Swedish girl crying, was the goodbye to Anna Bergendahl - absolute favourite amongst the Digital Spy forum members, and dead cert for the final in most peoples views. Saturday would be the first final in 33 years where Sweden had not participated, it was that unthinkable. But the truth was that Anna had ranked 9th in the televote and only 11th with the jury, and Cyprus's 10th/9th split won the last coveted place.

Coem the night itself, Oslo did us proud. I really enjoyed the staging, the postcards and mostly the interval act. Organising the flash mob dance was inspired (except the UK did itself no favours whatsoever, with poor organisation and precious little to show for it). The spectacle of the dance and the clips of the countries that had made an effort with it were amazing. Spoilt slightly by the over zealous security guards in the hall - but given that there had been a pitch invasion during the Spanish entry (why?) it was hardly surprising!

Not only were the UK shown up during the interval for a lack of planning, organisation and attitude, this spilled over to the UK entry who came a deserved last. Nothing against Josh Dubovie, he was a nice kid with a nice voice - but ... you can't polish a turd, and bottom of the table was deserved.

And in the same vein, a win for Germany was also deserved. I never thought I'd see the day (since the advent of semi finals and the "big four") that one of the automatically qualified countries would win out, and it made me feel just a bit proud that the music is still important...

Thanks Lena, you did a marvellous job - and thanks must also go to Ovi and Paula from Romania, as I ended the night £150 better off :)