Eurovision 2019

Madonna is too professional for Eurovision. Sure, her vocals were off key a tad. When that song was released 30 years ago, she had a much higher voice so she could get the pitch right. The trouble with ageing is that you tend to lose the pitch and tone you had when you were younger. Thankfully, her current releases suit her current pitch level and while she was out of key (in places not all of it) let's not forget that she has received a swathe of abuse and insults from fellow musicians - primal fear bloke called her a prostitute for daring to support Israel over Palestine - yet she went, she put on a show and actually made the Eurovision a bit better for doing so. The songs this year were mediocre. The UK did not deserve to come last. France was awful. San Marino, say no more. Spain, dull. Yet the UK performed worse in the results than when we send acts like Scooch.

I don't think Madonna's performance was anything like the Oliver Reed Parky interview. No one seems to recall Paul McCartney's out of key, out of sync performance at London 2012. He was awful. Madonna has more to prove because whatever anyone thinks of her personally, she is judged unfairly because she is a woman. A nearly 61 year old woman. Do people really expect her to sound exactly as she did 30 years ago? An off key performance is not career ending. Sexism and ageism by mainstream media is.

People aren’t criticising her because she’s a 60 year old woman. They’re criticising her because she was absolutely crap.

Alrighty.

Then you do what just about every other artist does as they age, drop the song to a lower key. No one minds. As for her vocals being off a ‘tad’? They were on another continent from the melody, it was painful. The new song wasn’t as obviously bad because it was covered in autotune and other effects. Strip that away and I suspect it would have been.


Absolute tosh - I was in the stadium at the Opening Ceremony of London 2012 and I’ve seen it a good few times since- the McCartney ‘mistake’ was that someone forgot to fade out the protools backup recording. Even if the performance wasn’t one of his best it was far far better than what Madonna did tonight. It’s got zero to do with sexism or gender. There are male and female performers of her age and older who can put on a show and perform songs from throughout their catalogue, making any adaptations they need to. It’s not about her age, her gender or age of the song, it’s about the performance.

She was terrible tonight, and any male artist of a similar stature who’d performed that badly would have been criticised in exactly the same way.

The BBC cut away on the last credit before the screen full of sponsor logos appeared, as those logos would breach the BBC's sponsorship policy, and probably now also cause Ofcom concern.

Here is a bit of a shock for the UK & Irish results at this year's Eurovision.

We've already known from earlier that the UK were in last place at the Final.

I've also just found out that Ireland were also in last place in the 2nd Semi-Final on Thursday night.

Overall both countries got the same amount of points.

Ireland got 16 points on Thursday night & the UK also got 16 points earlier tonight.

https://eurovision.tv/event/tel-aviv-2019/second-semi-final?sorting=rank&direction=asc

https://eurovision.tv/event/tel-aviv-2019/grand-final?direction=asc&sorting=rank

Go and watch Justin Timberlake's performance from 2016 and then come back.

She was absolutely shocking. I thought I heard bum notes when karaoke has been on in the pub, but that was something else. Nails down a blackboard sound more in tune than Madonna did last night.

The UK song didn't get my toes tapping or anything, and I could barely remember how it went 2 seconds after it ended. I therefore immediately thought "26th place for us". Various other songs immediately got into my head enough to mean I barely noticed duller immediately subsequent songs.

The UK's "staging" (pah!) was also nondescript. Just him ambling about the stage, and then the backing singers appearing in the background at the end. I'm not saying that it's absolutely necessary to have e.g. Denmark's enormous chair, Estonia's Augmented Reality storm etc, but at least *something* interesting wouldn't have gone amiss (not that I think it would have really helped the actual song, mind).

I'm glad he's upholding the tradition of 'good evening Europe, this is [place] calling', even if hardly anyone else is.

When I’ve visited Israel every foreign passenger is interviewed twice at the airport. You have to set aside 4 hours for check in. Could be interesting for them

Was he in Stockley Park ? It’s still nothing like, ‘Good Evening Europe from BBC Television Centre in London’ Even the mention of the equally iconic Hilversum was almost lost in the Dutch result announcement

Couldn't you tell by the magnificent view of Uxbridge behind him?