Eurovision 2016

Not at all. I much prefer the style of today compared to a few people dressed up in a theatre.

How the hell did you come to that conclusion?

Dunno; were they ? I can't remember, was that the year the Beeb managed to play out the first hour or so in just 1.0 audio on BBC HD ?

Haha I remember that.

Where does the UK go from here? I hope they continue with an NF as it was a small step in the right direction. My vision is to use BBC Introducing again. Have a finalist from each region via the radio element of BBC Introducing then the regions battle it out on TV with regional voting. It could even go to a venue in the winners region the following year. ESC in miniature if you like.

They probably let the RTS team handle some of the design - I think they did the postcards. The Swede's will have run the show technically and in direction terms - but in terms of production they will have had to have included input from the host broadcaster.

The postcards were SD ISTR...

Yep - major metadata issue between TV Centre studio and playout area - and because it was BBC HD which was not really run as a separate channel in operational terms, the sound monitoring wasn't full 5.1 WITH metadata (all the 5.1 audio channels were leaving the suite - it's just that the Dolby encoder was flagged to be Centre channel - which that year - as many since - only contained clean vocals and no backing track - so it was 'reverse karaoke') Even when BBC HD were made aware (they couldn't hear the problem in the playout area...) they couldn't - at that point - drop back to the stereo mix from TV Centre, that was also taken by BBC One SD, so they took BBC One SD up-converted ISTR.

At least the ratings were decent for BBC One. An average of 7.2m peaking at 8.8m.

Yes, away from the home loss, the show itself gets better each year and the new voting system was indeed more exciting (if confusing at first).

I think it proves are songs are not crap since the judge like them, its just the EU public hates us.

If there is a leave result next month, do we still get a "free pass" to Eurovision next year?

Oh here we go, the old "people hate us" argument again.

Russia came third. They topped the public vote. The winner was elected as a way of telling Putin to f**k himself.

It's got sod-all to do with that. If you believe that though, it's another reason to vote "leave" next month.

Yes. It's got nothing to do with the EU - see Switzerland, Norway and indeed this years' winners, Ukraine.

Our bye to the final comes as we are part of the Big 5 contributors to the EBU. Without the money from the BBC, RTE, TVE, FT and RAI the competition's staging would be a lot harder to do, and certainly to the scale or standard we've seen this decade.

I do wonder if the Big 5 thing remains relevant. Part of me says, yes, let's make the UK have to qualify. Faced with four hours of Saturday night primetime television on BBC One with no UK interest, it might force the Corporation to stop being so lax about the selection process (whilst I applaud the return of a National Final, it was no Melodifestivalen, was it?)

But would we qualify, even if we raised our game? Even I'm not sure now.

Well done for good ratings, but enough of the comments saying "we've lost, we were crap etc."

Any recommendations for next year?