The time I missed Eurovision… Part 2

As I haven’t really started to watch Eurovision until 2010, I basically missed all of the contests before that. I know, it’s a shame! But that’s why last year while spending the summer in a small town in Iceland I used the rainy and stormy days (which there were quite a few of) to watch all the 54 contests that I had missed – one by one. As you can imagine, it took me quite a while. By the time I got to number 54, the year of 2009, the last contest I had missed, I felt like I had just climbed Everest.
Watching the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 from Moscow, I was wondering whether I would have become the same Eurovision fan I am today if I had started watching it back then instead of the year after. I collected some pros and cons to answer that question.
Let’s start with the good things – the things that would have made me keep on watching Eurovision:

• The Belgian Elvis lookalike ”copycat” who didn’t make it to the final, unfortunately
• The Macedonian lion lookalike rock band who also failed to qualify (see below)
• The punk rock girl band from Ireland – not seen in the final either
• The Cirque Du Soleil opening act to the final
• Portugal (who would have thought!) and their happy hippie flower power song
• Iceland’s „Is it true“ which is one of my favorite earworms nowadays. Though I had to close my eyes during the song to protect myself from Yohanna’s ruffled baby blue dress and the dolphin flying through the night sky
• Denmark’s „Believe again“ which bears Ronan Keating’s hallmarks all over the place
• Turkey’s belly dance tune
• Alexander Rybak’s face

And now we’ll get to the not so good things – the things that probably would have made me switch off the TV during the show:

• Miss World 2008 who appeared in each and every single postcard carrying landmarks on her head
• The supergipsy from Czech Republic who deservedly ended up with nul points in the semi-final
• Bulgaria’s disturbing mess including squeaking, hair style accidents, shiny knee boots, ripped dresses, and stilts
• Dima Bilan’s appearance in the opening of the final coming flying down from the ceiling, running across the stage crashing through walls, and lolling around on the floor with his hair annoyingly hanging down in front of his eyes
• The Swedish opera tunes and the blinding white 37.000€ dress
• The Greek choreography and my constant urge to button Sakis Rouvas‘ shirt up
• Russian Anastasija Prychodko’s supersized suffering face projection
• Alex Swings Oscar Sings with another unbottoned shirt, shiny silver tights, trimmed eyebrows and a pointless appearence of Dita von Teese
• Albania’s green morph suit guy, the pink tutu, and the creepy pantomimes
• The presenter’s wrapping paper ribbon dress
• The Finnish rapper
• An overly excessive use of windmachines – it really felt worse than any other year
• ISS cosmonauts opening the lines for the voting
• The fear of the interval act artists either drowning in their pools on the ceiling or spinning to death – though the water spectacle was quite impressive (but also partly disturbing) to watch
• Alexander Rybak’s run-away-win

So, I guess the negative aspects outweigh the positive ones. But perhaps Alexander Rybak’s cute smile would have convinced me of the whole thing anyway. However, I enjoyed watching the contest today and I was surprised that the voting part is still kind of exciting even though you already know the results all along. I can only recommend you to watch the contests you have missed if you haven’t done it already. We would love to hear about your own experiences, so feel free to  leave us a comment!
If you want to know what watching the Song Contest of 2006 for the first time could be like, you can check out the first part of our little „The time I missed Eurovision“-series by Hlynur here.