Victory for Norway!!

So Norway are the winners of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest with "Fairytale", sung by Alexander Rybak. Once again the "pre-determined winner" actually goes ahead and wins the thing, as per "Molitva" (2007) and "Believe" (2008). I'm rather glad about this, if only for the reason that it wasn't one of the more-obvious-Eurovision-nations-of-recent-years running away with the whole thing.

When the results were coming in I was in the advance stages of a bottle of red wine so forgive me if my recollection is vague, but I distinctly remember yelling -with some delight - that Stian Barsnes Simonsen was giving the votes of the Norwegian jury (please please please give him the ESC presenting job next year NRK!!) - anyway my mum asked "who's Stian?" and I had to go into great detail about how he presented the final until 2007 and then he was replaced by the considerably less attractive Per Sundnes :( well you know the story....

Anyway I digress.

Well done to Russia for organising a massive extravaganza on a very grand scale. Tonight's final went very well indeed: presenters Ivan and Alsou were a vast improvement on the mega-shouty semi-final presenters.

Still trying to come to terms with the shock of Royaume-Uni not being in the bottom half of the scoreboard. I'm no fan of "It's My Time" but it was a job well done tonight. Therefore, my congratulations must go to Jade Ewen and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber: proof that effort does indeed bring rewards.

Full review here tomorrow: in the meantime here are the final results.

1. Norway 387
2. Iceland 218
3. Azerbaijan 207
4. Turkey 177
5. UK 173
6. Estonia 129
7. Greece 120
8. France 107
9. Bosnia-Herzegovina 106
10. Armenia 92
11. Russia 91
12. Ukraine 76
13. Denmark 74
14. Moldova
. Portugal 57
16. Israel 53
17. Albania 48
18. Croatia 45
19. Romania 40
20. Germany 35
21. Sweden 33
22. Malta 31
23. Lithuania 23
24. Spain 23
25. Finland 22

Anyway just after the final I got a text from faithful travelling companion - not an ESC fan, but making an exception this year once he knew Patricia Kaas was singing the French entry - and expressing considerable disgust that La Kaas was only 8th, 'amongst so much c**p' - of course I had to reassure him that this was actually a decent result by recent Eurovision standards :)

More to follow. It's been a long day though, involving retail therapy, decorating the EuropeCrazy HQ living room and finally Eurovision, so I'm off to get some well-earned rest. Back tomorrow afternoon - see ya then. :)