ESC 2011: Problems, protests, surprises and scandals

Germany is well know for it's punctuality and that things work. Eurovision 2011 apparently has proved that image wrong. And the worst happened last night when several countries were left without their commentators when the sound faded. Like Finland. We had two commentators, Asko Murtomäki, an Eurovision expert and newcomer Tarja Närhi (who was absolutely fabulous!!!), they got tired of the problems and the German saying just "We'll fix it" and 5 minutes before the start took their mobile phone and the whole show was commented by phone. It ment that most of the time only Tarja was speaking and they couldn't use their written script but had to improvise mostly - but they did a great job! Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Norway, Spain, Croatia and Serbia were amongst the countries that were left without commentators according Iltalehti.

And that brings us to protests. Norway was one of the biggest favourites to win the contest and instead didn't make it past the semifinal. It seems that the commentator sound wasn't the only problem but in some countries also the sound of the show was missing at times. In Finland there were no problems on that. Norway seems to have been ready to give a written protest but it apparently nothing came out of it.... (Sour grapes anyone?)

The big surprises were Turkey and Armenia not qualifying. Most every one took for granted they will qualify no matter what they send but instead no, they can drop out! That also blew most bloggers predictions, including myself. Most got seven right. I got six plus two that I had as one of these two so did I get 7,5? The best were once again All kind of everything's Keith and Andrew with 8 right. (*of those blogs and sites I have checked and they are quite many!)

The war between Swedish Eric Saade and Russian Alexey Vorobjov goes on. The old photo of naked Alexey that I have published already ages ago was re-published in Germany in attempt to get pubblicity which made Eric call Alexey with certain names... And talking of that, Alexey caused a scandal in Russia by yelling something like "Fuck Russia!" while waving the flag. On live TV. What he propably thought was ment to be positive after qualifying but.... you know, some people have taken it in a bad way!

Meanwhile Finland has climbed to top-10 contender in the betting odds while Paradise Oskar and the team celebrated in the night of Germany. Finland is in the final for the 5th time in 6th years, who would have thought about this in the 1990's?

But what was that interval act? Drums are so 2005!

Comments

Miyazaki said…

Our Hungarian commentator, Gábor Gundel-Takács also had to comment by phone :)

20:42

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