Spain: great song but either the dress or the dancing need to change.

Every year I back Spain to do well but they never manage to garner the votes across the board. Occasionally a few countries will love their entry and give them big points and they reach the left hand side of the scoreboard but there have been years when with one of the best songs they came close to last. Their fortunes seem to have matched UK's of late.

This young lady has bags of energy and it is a real pop song. I love the shoes although I am not so sure about the dancing. Or the dress. One needs to change.

For all that, though, I like this year's too and wish her well. It is a strong contender again. But, yes, I have said that many times before.

Iceland may have to change those graphics for Eurovision

I nearly always find Iceland's entries either excellent or intriguing and occasionally both. This year they have gone more commercial and seem to want to combine the Loreen effect with a background graphic effect to grab the votes.



They certainly grab attention and at one point I thought I was watching the Smoke Monster in Lost! Whilst very effective in parts, the shadows of hands, apparently without thumbs, were simply creepy and slightly worrying.

It could even be a future theme for X Files too.

Darline could give us our best chance for many years in Eurovision

We now have the six tracks offered for Eurovision 2016 as the UK Entry.

The stand-out for me is Until Tomorrow by Darline who opened for The Shires and have done some cool stuff over the last year. If the link isn't working and to hear the others, go to the BBC page.


Of the others, Joe & Jake seem pleasant enough lads who did reasonably well on The Voice a while back but their number is a bit reminiscent of Sweden's Heroes without the style.

Bianca is probably my second choice with a nice track co-written by Leona Lewis and a few others are behind the scenes on this one with experience. She's good but I can't really see it doing much.

Dulcima are another duo who sound good but it's a pretty forgettable number. Your fingers may strum for a while but odd things happen in the middle and you'll want to go and make some coffee.

Matthew James is an excellent singer. No idea where he comes from or who is behind him. Nice but 'nice' doesn't win. And this is a bit tedious after a while too.

Karl wrote Miracle himself and he's an impressive singer and it's not a bad song at all. It just wouldn't do much in Europe and probably wouldn't do much in our own charts. I guess it might challenge Bianca for second place but they all lose out by quite a long way to the young girls, Darline, who should be our representatives in May.

They remind me of a Netherlands duo from the year before last and one or two other quite gentle but appealing tracks that have made the Top 5. I give them a decent chance and get the feeling they won't be totally put off by the live show either.

One of the girls is Cára Beard so expect some silly jokes about a girl with a beard winning Eurovision again.

New Eurovision Voting Calculations

An interesting change this year in how the results will be calculated. This article explains it well.

In essence, before the various countries' juries would determine from their own and their national votes which ten acts would receive points. First would get 12, 2nd 10 and so on. Those all got added up as the evening progressed and, as you may recall, recent years have seen a clear winner established some twenty or thirty minutes before all the votes had been declared. Not ideal, especially for presenters and jury representatives delivering the last few scores.

Now there will be two sets of points awarded: the juries' as before and then the top ten acts based on national votes will also be noted and similar 12 to 1 scares allocated to them. These national votes will not be announced from act to act but accumulated behind the scenes and totals for each act announced at the end of the juries' figures. These will then be announced for each act, starting with the lowest. It is quite possible that the large numbers involved could have an impact on the acts' final positions so we would not know who had won until very close to the end.

The table below shows what the positions would have been had the system been in place last year. Sweden would still have won but the overall audience voting preference for Italy would have resulted in Italy taking second place. Had we been watching the scoreboard, we would have seen Latvia in second place for quite a while!

Country	Place old system	Place new system	Total old	Total new	Jury	Audience
Sweden	1	1	365	625	353	272
Italy	3	2	292	527	171	356
Russia	2	3	303	520	234	286
Belgium	4	4	217	376	186	190
Australia	5	5	196	348	224	124
Latvia	6	6	186	337	249	88
Norway	8	7	102	200	163	37
Estonia	7	8	106	197	53	144
Israel	9	9	97	179	77	102
Georgia	11	10	51	113	62	51
Serbia	10	11	53	98	12	86
Albania	17	12	34	97	4	93
Armenia	16	13	34	92	15	77
Romania	15	14	35	90	21	69
Azerbaijan	12	15	49	88	40	48
Montenegro	13	16	44	78	44	34
Lithuania	18	17	30	75	31	44
Cyprus	22	18	11	71	63	8
Slovenia	14	19	39	63	36	27
Greece	19	20	23	53	29	24
Poland	23	21	10	49	2	47
Hungary	20	22	19	46	29	17
Austria	26	23	0	40	40	0
Spain	21	24	15	32	6	26
Germany	27	25	0	29	24	5
France	25	26	4	27	24	3
United Kingdom	24	27	5	16	12	4

Unfortunately for us here in the UK, our act would have finished last but noone would have received nul points. We would have started as 23rd equal with the juries' 12 points. Then the presenters would have announced  our extra 4 points (after Austria's 0 and France's 3) giving us 16 and lifting us into 22nd place for a while but once Poland got their 47 added and Albania their remarkable 93 A huge difference between jury and public there!) we would be down at the bottom and that would be that.

Sweden's 353 jury score would have had them at the top for most of the time but with five nations still to declare it would have been Latvia in 2nd place. When Australia's total is announced they leap into 2nd place an Belgium briefly take top spot when their scores are announced! Sweden's get announced next and that'll put them back at the top and it can be seen then that Italy would need 454 to catch them and Russia 391. (Someone with a calculator may have worked out by now that there are only 642 left and the next scores both have to be greater than Sweden's 272 so the highest one could be is 369, so not possible but not obviously so).

Russia get their 286 announced and fly from 5th to 2nd. The final vote is Italy and they get just enough to overtake Russia to take 2nd place after being 8th for most of the evening.

These figures are from the table shown on the site linked above. With 39 countries voting the total votes would be 2262 which is what the audience figures add up to but the jury figures only total 2204. That seems to indicate that one country's jury votes were not counted. No idea why. It is unlikely to affect the comparison, though.

Death Proof Theme

La La Land - nice start by Jax (who should have won American Idol)

Deep Purple - A Child In Time (Live)

While we're waiting for the X Factor UK results and to see whether we'll get to see American Idol's last series here in Britain, and wondering just who will be given the task of representing us in Eurovision 2016 (I recommend the Stereophonics), here is a really good live version of this track. Deep Purple In Rock was one of the very first albums I bought.