Eurovision is finally coming!

The Eurovision Song Contest Finals is the only television-based event that ever works its way to pride of place on my calendar. This year is absolutely no exception.

Frankly, this year has a lot to stand up to. Last year’s truly amazing Eurovision Finals were outstandingly entertaining. A year on, and I am regularly found dancing around my room in my pants, getting ready for the most mundane of occasions, to Alex Swings Oscar Sings’ ‘Miss Kiss Kiss Bang’. I still desperately want to be one of his dancing girls. Sigh.

Before we continue, I highly recommend you head to You Tube (HD!) immediately to sample these true delights. Alex Swings wearing silver, skin-tight trousers will hopefully stay with me forever. And, as much as he annoyed me, I got goosebumps from that Alexander Rybak squeaking away on his violin blasting ‘I’m in love with a fairytale’ from his abdomen. Yes, it was as marvellously Euro-tripe as it sounds. He was also the winner of Eurovision 2009, and it’s being hosted in Oslo this year.

So you can imagine my devastation when Alex Swings, with his lovely legs, came in at 23rd place (out of 25!!) and my other favourite, Svetlana Lobada (the Ukraine’s entry) with ‘Be My Valentine’ (who reportedly remortgaged her flat to pay for the stage props) came in 12th.

Admittedly, I was completely twatted watching the whole thing… but I haven’t been continually drunk for an entire year since. I still utterly love and adore them.

This year, I am recruiting fellow Eurovision fans, to join me getting horribly drunk to the levels where you start bellowing at the telly, ‘You can’t SING!!’ (Israel - Noa & Mira Awad) and ‘WHAT are you WEARING?!’ Iceland’s Yohanna and Romania’s The Balkan Girls, I’m talking to YOU. Though, The Balkan Girls do ‘start their weekend with gin, tonic and lime’. I wonder if I lost about 12 stone, and grew my hair down to my arse they’d let me join their number? I’d probably need the gin to survive.

On a completely unrelated matter, the other amazing quality to the Romanian entry is the main ‘singer’ is actually miming (out of time) to the girl singing, short-haired, unlit and hidden at the back of the stage. The wonderful Graham Norton told us that the actual voice had be on stage. Inventive Romania.

So yes, it’s about 3 days away, I’ve avoided watching the semi-finals because I want to be a entirely entranced (by gin) watching the - hopefully - hideously glittery, firework-filled, Euro-tripe ridden occasion it always promises it will be. Come and join us for the best time of the year for television, when those that can sing (Malta - What If We) are discarded at the bottom of the voting tables, and those that put on a magical spectacle of sheer bollocks are victorious.

And for those that still protest, if the Moscow hosting’s anything to go by, it’s educational. It’s true! Each entry was pre-fixed with a montage of some…thing, and a Russian word. Did you know, for example, that ‘tantsui’ is Russian for is ‘dance’? I bet you didn’t.