You might remember that, a few days before the independence referendum, Betfair produced a picture of David Cameron standing in front of a Union Jack, and declared the No campaign - which a jingoistic Cameron was apparently the living embodiment of - the winner. They even paid out on 'No' bets early. That was an extraordinary thing to do given how close the race was at the time, but they insisted that they were never wrong about these things. Now, you could argue that they were ultimately vindicated (albeit only after an almighty late scare), but then they'd have had a 50/50 chance of being "proved right" about the outcome of a coin toss. Too many stunts of that sort during close contests, and they're bound to eventually come a cropper.
That hasn't happened to Betfair yet (it will), but amusingly it looks like it might be about to happen to Paddy Power. They paid out on a Yes victory in the Greek referendum four days ago, which was a barmy thing to do at a time when some polls were actually showing No in the lead! Today, the betting exchanges have swung very suddenly and dramatically towards No, seemingly on the basis of leaked exit poll results. At the time of writing, No are overwhelming 2/11 favourites on Betfair, and Yes are 4/1. Quite some turnaround, and if there isn't another twist in the tale to come, Paddy Power are going to be left with copious amounts of egg on their faces tonight.
Doubtless our old friend Mr Lovatt will still attempt to claim without any trace of irony that the betting exchanges once again "correctly predicted the outcome". Which is quite true - if at some point or another you predict both outcomes in a two-horse race, you can't really go astray.
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greece. Show all posts
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Saturday, July 4, 2015
For one day only : introducing the Scot Goes Pop Hellenic Poll of Polls
I can't totally vouch for the accuracy of these figures, because it's difficult to find an exhaustive list of opinion polls for tomorrow's crucial referendum in Greece, but as a far as I can see an average of all the polls conducted entirely since July 1st produces the following numbers...
Between the options of YES and NO on the institutions proposal, which one would you choose?
Yes 44.3%
No 44.1%
In other words, it's far, far, far too close to call. The bookies' expectation (and therefore by automatic extension Neil Lovatt's expectation) that Yes will win is probably based on two main factors - the theory that voters tend to break for the more conservative option when it comes to the crunch, and also the modest momentum that Yes has enjoyed over the course of the ultra-truncated campaign. We'll soon discover whether that reasoning proves well-founded.
However, you don't actually have to wait on tenterhooks for the result, because PB's David Herdson has, in his trademark unassuming style, told us what will DEFINITELY HAPPEN regardless of whether it's a Yes vote or a No vote -
"The act of a snap referendum was, however, perhaps predictable as the equivalent of a student sit-in or protest march, which is the kind of politics Syriza is familiar with: the belief that a demonstration of solidarity and causing enough of a fuss will force opponents to grant concessions.
Those tactics work rarely enough in the workplace or the university, never mind the conference chambers of government, which is why Syriza has signed its own government’s death warrant."
David goes on to congratulate himself on being a pro-austerity Tory, and therefore right about absolutely everything. It would save a great deal of time if the rest of us would just grow up and accept that.
Still, I'd just like to gently say that I'm not sure David's logic is entirely solid on this particular occasion. He assumes that a Yes vote will lead immediately to the Greek government's resignation. Will it? Quite possibly, but I'm not 100% convinced. He also assumes that the centre-right New Democracy would win any subsequent general election, and that's where I'm much more confident he's going astray. Greece has a barking mad electoral system, which effectively turns PR into a winner-takes-all affair. Syriza could easily win a fresh general election on a substantial minority vote similar to that won by Cameron's "One Nation" Conservatives in this country, and after a tight referendum I think that would be the most likely outcome. Why would a significant chunk of the 45%+ of voters who had just voted No to austerity in a referendum suddenly start to vote for pro-austerity parties at a general election? That's the only way Syriza could lose (as long as the party itself doesn't fracture, which may be a risk).
* * *
RevStu is rightly proud of a new Panelbase poll which shows that Wings Over Scotland is now the third most popular source of political content in Scotland, with 10% of the population reporting that they visit the site at least once a week for that specific purpose. However, just to inject a small note of caution, this is one of those rare occasions where we can say with confidence that an online poll is likely to have produced a slightly misleading result, because we know that politically-committed people who use the internet a great deal are over-represented in volunteer online polling panels. We'd really need a telephone poll to get a more accurate result - my guess is that it would still show the alternative media doing extremely well, but not quite reaching the giddy heights suggested by Panelbase.
For example, the poll suggests that NewsShaft is visited by 2% of the population for political content every week - that would imply that they get well over 100,000 unique visitors per week (I say 'well over' because any Scottish political site also gets visitors from outside Scotland). I don't know what their actual figures are, but I would guess that they're probably a bit lower than that.
Incidentally, Scot Goes Pop had 12,500 unique readers on Tuesday of this week. That's far and away the most it's ever had in a single day - I think the previous record high was somewhere between 6000 and 7000. It came completely out of the blue, and was plainly caused by the outrage over the cheers at Westminster after the huge 56-3 Scottish majority in favour of Home Rule was overturned by English MPs.
Between the options of YES and NO on the institutions proposal, which one would you choose?
Yes 44.3%
No 44.1%
In other words, it's far, far, far too close to call. The bookies' expectation (and therefore by automatic extension Neil Lovatt's expectation) that Yes will win is probably based on two main factors - the theory that voters tend to break for the more conservative option when it comes to the crunch, and also the modest momentum that Yes has enjoyed over the course of the ultra-truncated campaign. We'll soon discover whether that reasoning proves well-founded.
However, you don't actually have to wait on tenterhooks for the result, because PB's David Herdson has, in his trademark unassuming style, told us what will DEFINITELY HAPPEN regardless of whether it's a Yes vote or a No vote -
"The act of a snap referendum was, however, perhaps predictable as the equivalent of a student sit-in or protest march, which is the kind of politics Syriza is familiar with: the belief that a demonstration of solidarity and causing enough of a fuss will force opponents to grant concessions.
Those tactics work rarely enough in the workplace or the university, never mind the conference chambers of government, which is why Syriza has signed its own government’s death warrant."
David goes on to congratulate himself on being a pro-austerity Tory, and therefore right about absolutely everything. It would save a great deal of time if the rest of us would just grow up and accept that.
Still, I'd just like to gently say that I'm not sure David's logic is entirely solid on this particular occasion. He assumes that a Yes vote will lead immediately to the Greek government's resignation. Will it? Quite possibly, but I'm not 100% convinced. He also assumes that the centre-right New Democracy would win any subsequent general election, and that's where I'm much more confident he's going astray. Greece has a barking mad electoral system, which effectively turns PR into a winner-takes-all affair. Syriza could easily win a fresh general election on a substantial minority vote similar to that won by Cameron's "One Nation" Conservatives in this country, and after a tight referendum I think that would be the most likely outcome. Why would a significant chunk of the 45%+ of voters who had just voted No to austerity in a referendum suddenly start to vote for pro-austerity parties at a general election? That's the only way Syriza could lose (as long as the party itself doesn't fracture, which may be a risk).
* * *
RevStu is rightly proud of a new Panelbase poll which shows that Wings Over Scotland is now the third most popular source of political content in Scotland, with 10% of the population reporting that they visit the site at least once a week for that specific purpose. However, just to inject a small note of caution, this is one of those rare occasions where we can say with confidence that an online poll is likely to have produced a slightly misleading result, because we know that politically-committed people who use the internet a great deal are over-represented in volunteer online polling panels. We'd really need a telephone poll to get a more accurate result - my guess is that it would still show the alternative media doing extremely well, but not quite reaching the giddy heights suggested by Panelbase.
For example, the poll suggests that NewsShaft is visited by 2% of the population for political content every week - that would imply that they get well over 100,000 unique visitors per week (I say 'well over' because any Scottish political site also gets visitors from outside Scotland). I don't know what their actual figures are, but I would guess that they're probably a bit lower than that.
Incidentally, Scot Goes Pop had 12,500 unique readers on Tuesday of this week. That's far and away the most it's ever had in a single day - I think the previous record high was somewhere between 6000 and 7000. It came completely out of the blue, and was plainly caused by the outrage over the cheers at Westminster after the huge 56-3 Scottish majority in favour of Home Rule was overturned by English MPs.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Sizzling Syriza surge to historic Hellenic haul
I think the last time I mentioned Syriza on this blog was during the Greek election three years ago, when I felt moved to point out that, contrary to the claim of one particularly excitable journalist, the said election was not the most important in the whole of human history. Given that a German election in the 1930s brought Hitler to power and led to the deaths of sixty million people, there's some pretty tough competition on that front.
I don't think today's election was the most important in human history either, but it certainly has the potential to be a crucial turning point in the history of Europe. At some point after the end of the Cold War, democracy essentially withered - you could have any government you liked, as long as it was neoliberal-flavoured (or as long as it "lived in the real world", as Tony Blair liked to put it). At long last, big ideas and real electoral choices are back on the menu - and Scotland has played as much of a part in bringing that about as Greece.
I've been pondering whether Syriza's triumph could be of any help to the Scottish independence movement, and I think there's one sense in which it might. If there's a snowball effect leading to a Podemos victory in Spain later this year, that could clear the path for an official Catalan independence referendum. And the fates of Catalonia and Scotland do seem to have become entwined somehow.
Monday, May 7, 2012
You can't be half-pregnant, but it seems you can have PR without much proportionality
There's much consternation in the elites of the EU this morning, because it looks like the two pro-austerity parties in Greece, New Democracy and PASOK, will fall just short of an outright parliamentary majority. But in truth it should never even have been close. The two parties' combined share of the vote tumbled from 77.4% in 2009 to just 32% yesterday, so the fact that they've still ended up with more or less exactly half the seats is a perversion of the democratic process that you'd only ever expect to see under "good old British" first-past-the-post. Given that Greece supposedly has a system of proportional representation, how on earth did it happen? There are two reasons. The more prosaic one is that a great many parties fell below the 3% threshold required for any representation, meaning that all the parties that reached the threshold had surplus seats to share between them. The more eccentric reason is that the Greek system randomly hands 50 bonus seats to the party in first place. This applies regardless of whether the leading party has 60% of the vote or 7%, and regardless of whether its lead over the second-placed party is 23% or 0.00001%. It is, in short, a nonsense, and has clearly thwarted the democratic will of the Greek people on this occasion.
I can only assume that the rule was introduced to produce a decisive winner in old-style two-party contests, but when the party system suddenly becomes more fractured, the effect is far more distorting. To put it in perspective, New Democracy are projected to secure 108 seats with their "election-winning" 18.85% of the vote, whereas the left-wing coalition in second place will claim just 52 seats with their 16.8% of the vote.
But there are more insidious ways in which the devisers of electoral and governing systems can deliver 'proportional representation' without much proportionality. One of the very first posts I wrote on this blog back in May 2008 pointed out that PR for the London Assembly is a sham, and the election last Thursday illustrated that point beautifully. London voters were deeply divided - the Tories led by 44% to 40% in the mayoral vote, and Labour led by 41% to 32% in the Assembly election. The purpose of PR in such circumstances ought to be to produce balance and pluralism. But because a two-thirds majority is required for the Assembly to exercise its one and only meaningful power (to reject the Mayor's budget), the Tories are left with absolute power on a minority vote - just as would happen under FPTP. The irony is that, in combination with the two-thirds rule, PR for the Assembly actually makes it less likely that there can be any check on the Mayor's power, because the distorting nature of FPTP would have made it easier to achieve the big majority required to alter the budget.
So London has the superficial appearance of proportionality and pluralism without an iota of the substance - a characteristically Blairite concoction. Thanks heavens we in Scotland (to use Mrs Thatcher's phrase) have gone in completely the opposite direction, and instead of concentrating local government executive power in the hands of one person, have dispersed power by means of a genuinely proportional system.
I can only assume that the rule was introduced to produce a decisive winner in old-style two-party contests, but when the party system suddenly becomes more fractured, the effect is far more distorting. To put it in perspective, New Democracy are projected to secure 108 seats with their "election-winning" 18.85% of the vote, whereas the left-wing coalition in second place will claim just 52 seats with their 16.8% of the vote.
But there are more insidious ways in which the devisers of electoral and governing systems can deliver 'proportional representation' without much proportionality. One of the very first posts I wrote on this blog back in May 2008 pointed out that PR for the London Assembly is a sham, and the election last Thursday illustrated that point beautifully. London voters were deeply divided - the Tories led by 44% to 40% in the mayoral vote, and Labour led by 41% to 32% in the Assembly election. The purpose of PR in such circumstances ought to be to produce balance and pluralism. But because a two-thirds majority is required for the Assembly to exercise its one and only meaningful power (to reject the Mayor's budget), the Tories are left with absolute power on a minority vote - just as would happen under FPTP. The irony is that, in combination with the two-thirds rule, PR for the Assembly actually makes it less likely that there can be any check on the Mayor's power, because the distorting nature of FPTP would have made it easier to achieve the big majority required to alter the budget.
So London has the superficial appearance of proportionality and pluralism without an iota of the substance - a characteristically Blairite concoction. Thanks heavens we in Scotland (to use Mrs Thatcher's phrase) have gone in completely the opposite direction, and instead of concentrating local government executive power in the hands of one person, have dispersed power by means of a genuinely proportional system.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Stranger things are starting to begin
Perhaps this is the time of year that I always think this, but I'm beginning to seriously despair of the 2011 Eurovision crop. Of the songs I've heard from the national selections so far, a mere three have really reached out and grabbed me (although there may be some good ones I haven't caught up with yet), and of those, two failed to win the ticket to Düsseldorf. Admittedly there were special circumstances - a sympathy vote following the death of another song's original performer - that partly explain Jóhanna's failure in Iceland, but the overlooking of Nicki Ponte's I Don't Wanna Dance in this evening's Greek final is utterly beyond me.
The one gem that has made it through comes from that unlikeliest of sources - the hosts Germany. Much as I never found Lena Meyer-Landrut half as irritating last year as some people seemed to, I was still slightly dubious about the wisdom of allowing her to 'defend her title'. However, with a brave choice of song that once again suits her quirkiness down to the ground, it looks like it might just pay off - at least to some extent. Taken By a Stranger is probably a bit too low-key to win outright, but the way things are going it may well deserve to.
One thing that occurred to me when I was listening to it the first time round was that, just like Satellite, the lyrics seemed a bit too offbeat and intricate to have been written by a non-native speaker of English. Sure enough, they appear to have been penned by an American. That's surely one of the biggest downsides of the scrapping of the language restrictions twelve years ago - now that Germany have established it can be an advantage, we'll probably see more and more songwriters from English-speaking countries being drafted in, narrowing the contest's 'gene pool' considerably.
The one gem that has made it through comes from that unlikeliest of sources - the hosts Germany. Much as I never found Lena Meyer-Landrut half as irritating last year as some people seemed to, I was still slightly dubious about the wisdom of allowing her to 'defend her title'. However, with a brave choice of song that once again suits her quirkiness down to the ground, it looks like it might just pay off - at least to some extent. Taken By a Stranger is probably a bit too low-key to win outright, but the way things are going it may well deserve to.
One thing that occurred to me when I was listening to it the first time round was that, just like Satellite, the lyrics seemed a bit too offbeat and intricate to have been written by a non-native speaker of English. Sure enough, they appear to have been penned by an American. That's surely one of the biggest downsides of the scrapping of the language restrictions twelve years ago - now that Germany have established it can be an advantage, we'll probably see more and more songwriters from English-speaking countries being drafted in, narrowing the contest's 'gene pool' considerably.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
My prediction for Eurovision final (Saturday)
I fared reasonably well with my top three prediction last year (I got the top two right, and my tip for third came sixth) so I'm going to be a bit more ambitious this time round and attempt the top five. Almost certainly a recipe for disaster, for as much as there's a red-hot favourite this year, the lower placings are very difficult to predict. For a long time I'd been feeling confident that, with both an extremely favourable draw and the Andrew Lloyd-Webber factor, the UK were set fair for a top five placing, but I'm now starting to get cold feet about that after the reports from today's rehearsals. Inexplicably, the juries vote after the final rehearsal, meaning that 50% of the vote is settled on the basis of something the audience don't actually get to see (can't be justified, surely?), so a less-than-perfect performance today may well have dented Jade's chances significantly. So, with that in mind, here's my wild stab in the dark...
Winners - Norway
2nd - Greece
3rd - Bosnia-Herzegovina
4th - Iceland
5th - Portugal
Possible dark horses - UK, Malta
I know I said last night that I thought we were heading back to Athens, and I'd stand by that if only Greece hadn't received such a significantly worse draw than Norway. I still personally don't fully understand the appeal of the Norwegian song, but there are times when a consensus of opinion is so strong you just can't ignore it.
I still can't make up my mind who I'll be voting for myself - with my personal rule of always voting for an entry entirely sung in a language other than English, it'll be either Portugal or Estonia, but on the basis of the semi-final performances they're quite evenly-matched for me. But my heart will be with the superb Icelandic entry all the way.
Of course, the fascination of tomorrow night will be to see how the new voting system works in practice. I suspect that although the political voting patterns will be somewhat diluted, they'll still be very noticeable. Let's not forget that Greece and Cyprus used to regularly swap 12 points even in the days when the voting was 100% jury.
Winners - Norway
2nd - Greece
3rd - Bosnia-Herzegovina
4th - Iceland
5th - Portugal
Possible dark horses - UK, Malta
I know I said last night that I thought we were heading back to Athens, and I'd stand by that if only Greece hadn't received such a significantly worse draw than Norway. I still personally don't fully understand the appeal of the Norwegian song, but there are times when a consensus of opinion is so strong you just can't ignore it.
I still can't make up my mind who I'll be voting for myself - with my personal rule of always voting for an entry entirely sung in a language other than English, it'll be either Portugal or Estonia, but on the basis of the semi-final performances they're quite evenly-matched for me. But my heart will be with the superb Icelandic entry all the way.
Of course, the fascination of tomorrow night will be to see how the new voting system works in practice. I suspect that although the political voting patterns will be somewhat diluted, they'll still be very noticeable. Let's not forget that Greece and Cyprus used to regularly swap 12 points even in the days when the voting was 100% jury.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Get rid of the old, take a hold and be free
My first reflection on tonight's Eurovision semi is that I think we're heading back to Athens next year. The staging of the Greek entry was quite breathtaking - it hardly seems to matter that it's an average sort of song, averagely sung. What does matter of course is that Sakis Rouvas is a major star across many parts of Europe, and all things considered I think he may just have the beating of Norway. On the other hand, I have to admit that I haven't entirely understood the widespread appeal of Norway from the moment I first heard it a couple of months ago! My other confession is that I actually voted against This is Our Night in the Greek national final (the first opportunity I'd ever had to vote in a non-UK selection) which may end up looking like a slightly silly decision in forty-eight hours' time. But then I voted for Yodel In The Canyon Of Love in 1997 as well...
As for my prediction, in spite of the momentary loss of nerve I mentioned on Twitter, I did fare slightly better this time and got nine out of ten right. My only blemish was that I thought Serbia would go through and Albania wouldn't. (Memo to Serbia - revert to one of those powerful ethnic ballads next year!) Funnily enough, when I was drawing up the list I pondered putting Albania in at the last minute - but if I had done it would have been Denmark I'd have left out. As ever, it'll be interesting to see which song was the jury pick.
I'm sure I'd already know the answer to this if I'd been following it closely enough over the last few months - but why were Greece and Cyprus paired together in the same semi-final? If the main purpose of the new (as in new last year) rules is to split up the various Eurovision old pals' act, none dates back further than the Greeks and the Cypriots.
Oh, and Estonia were indeed excellent. It'll be a close call between them and Portugal when I'm deciding how to vote on Saturday.
As for my prediction, in spite of the momentary loss of nerve I mentioned on Twitter, I did fare slightly better this time and got nine out of ten right. My only blemish was that I thought Serbia would go through and Albania wouldn't. (Memo to Serbia - revert to one of those powerful ethnic ballads next year!) Funnily enough, when I was drawing up the list I pondered putting Albania in at the last minute - but if I had done it would have been Denmark I'd have left out. As ever, it'll be interesting to see which song was the jury pick.
I'm sure I'd already know the answer to this if I'd been following it closely enough over the last few months - but why were Greece and Cyprus paired together in the same semi-final? If the main purpose of the new (as in new last year) rules is to split up the various Eurovision old pals' act, none dates back further than the Greeks and the Cypriots.
Oh, and Estonia were indeed excellent. It'll be a close call between them and Portugal when I'm deciding how to vote on Saturday.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Solutions to the Eurovision political voting problem
I went out of my way to defend Terry Wogan on the All Kinds of Everything blog yesterday (I know, I've got an unhealthy fixation with that place), so it was a bit disappointing to hear him make such fatalistic remarks about the future of the Eurovision Song Contest in his commentary tonight. If he's ready to call it a day, that's his prerogative, but the idea that the entirety of western Europe is going to join him in doing so is a bit melodramatic. I wouldn't deny for a moment there's a serious problem with political voting, but the irony is that this is the year a significant first step was made towards addressing that issue. The new rules that applied at the semi-final stage successfully produced a fair balance between western and eastern qualifiers for the first time in years, so now all that's needed is a similar innovation to sort out the problem in the final. Off the top of my head, I can think of four possibilities that would provide at least a partial solution.
1) Allow each country to award points to fifteen different entries, instead of the current ten. This wouldn't have been feasible in the past, but now that only the top marks are read out, it would no longer slow proceedings down at all. Of course, under this system the top points would still be awarded on a neighbourly basis, but it's reasonable to assume the lower set of points would be distributed more on merit, leading to a fairer overall outcome. An example to illustrate - if a country happened to finish twelfth out of twenty-five in every single televote, under the current system it would finish last with no points at all. That simply can't be considered a fair reflection of the result people are actually voting for.
2) Allow each country to award points to five eastern countries, and five western countries. This would have the advantage of still allowing viewers to decide the result, and still to vote for whichever country they like - indeed it would be a strong incentive to cast two votes - but it would also, at a stroke, neutralise the in-built advantage eastern countries currently enjoy.
3) The BBC could surrender its 'Big Four' status in exchange for something more worthwhile - separate representation in the contest for Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It would be the right thing to do on its own merits, but it would also produce a new British Isles voting bloc that could balance out its counterparts in the Balkans, the Baltic, Scandinavia, and the ex-Soviet Union. And if anyone tells you Scotland would never award high marks to England, I can tell you for certain they're wrong. Apart from anything else, about 8% of the population is English-born.
4) Revert to a 50/50 weighting for the jury and televote. Probably the simplest solution, in that it's been done before, at least in some countries.
On the contest itself, I was a bit disappointed to see Russia run away with it - as I said before Serbia, Portugal and Albania were my favourites, but I would still have been much happier to see Greece, Ukraine or Armenia take the crown than Russia. Ah well, it's all a matter of personal taste at the end of the day. At least I had the satisfaction of seeing my prediction turn out to be close to the money, although it wasn't exactly a tough one to call this year! And at least the song that was 'clearly the worst in the whole contest' (© Keith Mills 2008) somehow managed to finish 5th out of 43 entries. Wonder how it managed that?
1) Allow each country to award points to fifteen different entries, instead of the current ten. This wouldn't have been feasible in the past, but now that only the top marks are read out, it would no longer slow proceedings down at all. Of course, under this system the top points would still be awarded on a neighbourly basis, but it's reasonable to assume the lower set of points would be distributed more on merit, leading to a fairer overall outcome. An example to illustrate - if a country happened to finish twelfth out of twenty-five in every single televote, under the current system it would finish last with no points at all. That simply can't be considered a fair reflection of the result people are actually voting for.
2) Allow each country to award points to five eastern countries, and five western countries. This would have the advantage of still allowing viewers to decide the result, and still to vote for whichever country they like - indeed it would be a strong incentive to cast two votes - but it would also, at a stroke, neutralise the in-built advantage eastern countries currently enjoy.
3) The BBC could surrender its 'Big Four' status in exchange for something more worthwhile - separate representation in the contest for Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It would be the right thing to do on its own merits, but it would also produce a new British Isles voting bloc that could balance out its counterparts in the Balkans, the Baltic, Scandinavia, and the ex-Soviet Union. And if anyone tells you Scotland would never award high marks to England, I can tell you for certain they're wrong. Apart from anything else, about 8% of the population is English-born.
4) Revert to a 50/50 weighting for the jury and televote. Probably the simplest solution, in that it's been done before, at least in some countries.
On the contest itself, I was a bit disappointed to see Russia run away with it - as I said before Serbia, Portugal and Albania were my favourites, but I would still have been much happier to see Greece, Ukraine or Armenia take the crown than Russia. Ah well, it's all a matter of personal taste at the end of the day. At least I had the satisfaction of seeing my prediction turn out to be close to the money, although it wasn't exactly a tough one to call this year! And at least the song that was 'clearly the worst in the whole contest' (© Keith Mills 2008) somehow managed to finish 5th out of 43 entries. Wonder how it managed that?
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Prediction for Eurovision final (Saturday)
There's an episode of the 1980s sitcom Just Good Friends where Jan Francis' character repeatedly tells Paul Nicholas there's "something missing" in their relationship without specifying what, which eventually results in an exasperated Nicholas screaming "WHAT IS THIS THING?". I felt a bit like that today when trying to make sense of the reports of Jelena Tomašević's performance in the final round of rehearsals. The most frequent comment was that she was in good voice, but that there was "something" missing. WHAT IS THIS THING?Even leaving aside this missing thing that everyone seems utterly incapable of articulating (maybe Andy Abraham's nightmare vision has already come to pass), I was always a bit sceptical that Serbia could quite pull it off. In my view, it's definitely the class song of the field, but then I thought the same about Serbia & Montenegro in 2004 (they came second) and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2006 (they came third). So my prediction for Serbia is top three, but without any embarrassing need for Zeljko Joksimovic to present the trophy to himself. ("Great song, Zelkjo." "Thanks, Zeljko, you did a great job presenting too. And I love what you've done with your hair.")
But if not Serbia, then who? The bookies seem to agree (although they've been spectacularly wrong before) that the only other countries in serious contention are Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Sweden, and possibly Armenia. Personally, I just can't see Sweden winning - Hero is slightly higher quality than their usual fare, but it's still sticking to the same basic formula that frequently delivers them fifth or sixth place but no higher. I think Greece and Armenia will similarly come up short, so that leaves a battle between Ukraine and Russia. If that's the case, I feel Russia might just sneak it, if only because it cunningly draws the ice skating and violin-loving demographic into the pool of potential televoters (I'm being flippant).
So my prediction is :
Winners - Russia
2nd - Ukraine
3rd - Serbia
Potential dark horses :
Portugal
Norway (aka 'clearly the worst song in the contest', © Keith Mills 2008)
Mr Mills' musings also lead me to have an even greater interest in the fate of the UK this year. He confidently stated at a ridiculously early stage (when many songs had yet to even be selected) that Andy Abraham was 'certain' to finish in the bottom five, and was highly likely to finish last. I responded that I felt he could achieve the UK's best result since Jessica Garlick, which would mean a top fifteen placing. Unfortunately, I made that prediction before the UK received its lousy place in the draw, so I'm less confident than I was, but to be honest I'd settle for top twenty - since that would be sufficient to show up Mr Mills' "certainty" for the closed-minded nonsense it always was. Here's hoping.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
My issues with this year's Eurovision contestants - no. 5
Morena of Malta
"Spy One to Spy Four
I’ve deciphered the code, yeah…
Vodka – that’s the secret word
Vodka – and they want it so bad
Vodka – I’ve deciphered the code"
That's a tremendous achievement, Morena, congratulations. Just one small thing though - and brace yourself for some grim news at this point - you've just won a destination in the centre of our resident enigma's heart.
"Spy One to Spy Four
I’ve deciphered the code, yeah…
Vodka – that’s the secret word
Vodka – and they want it so bad
Vodka – I’ve deciphered the code"
That's a tremendous achievement, Morena, congratulations. Just one small thing though - and brace yourself for some grim news at this point - you've just won a destination in the centre of our resident enigma's heart.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
My issues with this year's Eurovision contestants - no. 1
Kalomira of Greece"An open book, an open book, well I'm sorry I am not..."
Is it entirely healthy to be quite so bloody triumphant about not being an open book? I'm not a slightly ajar door but I don't feel the need to witter on about it endlessly. But the lassie's narcissism doesn't end there -
"Sometimes I'm acting like a lady
sometimes woman, sometimes baby"
Oooh, what an enigma. If it's all the same to you, love, I might forego all this "finding your secret combination" and "winning a destination in the centre of your heart" malarkey and just concentrate on having a chocolate hobnob instead. At least you know where you are with one of those.
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