For as long as I can remember, I’ve been jealous of band photographers. It wasn’t just a jealousy of their talents, but of their privileges: I wanted to be in the pit with them, taking actual pictures of amazing moments rather than just imagining how my own shots would turn out.

At university, I worked for the student radio station. After scoring arguably the best role there was – Head of Music – I found myself inundated with free CDs, gig tickets and interview opportunities. It was a dream come true. After a little while, I realised that maybe, if I asked, if I asked really nicely, just maybe I would be awarded the photo passes I’d always coveted.

I had a crap camera, but I didn’t mind; I was giddy just to be in the pit, shooting beside professionals with equipment that made mine look like a Fisher Price toy. It was stressful and difficult but so much fun. I loved every second.

Graduating from uni wasn’t nearly as hard as leaving the radio station. I’d grown to love the dirty, cluttered little building we called our home, and I knew I’d never quite get over having to leave behind my guestlist passes and freebies. The pit passes were especially hard to say goodbye to, even though I was pretty dreadful behind the lens.

I didn’t get the opportunity to photograph again until the very end of 2007. I took my crappy camera to a Gogol Bordello show in Sheffield, before which I was due to have a meeting with Eliot and Eugene to discuss progress on the band’s website. I shyly asked Eliot if it would be okay to photograph that night and he handed me a press sticker. I asked if this was good for three songs, the standard allowance, and he asked if I wanted more. When I squeaked out that maybe I would, he found a laminate for me and said I could shoot the whole gig with that.

I spent the rest of the night on cloud nine. From the first time I saw Gogol Bordello live, all I wanted was the opportunity to shoot them. I coveted pictures taken by the likes of Danny North and Bossanostra, wishing desperately that I had not only their talent, but the privilege of being allowed in that precious pit.

That night in Sheffield, I finally got my chance. My camera was even shitter then than it was when it was new, and my memory card could only save about 300 shots (now I take around 2,000 per gig), but it was an amazing experience.

And while my pictures from that show are basically examples of well-meaning but slightly foolhardy amateur aspiration, when I look at them now I can still feel how excited I was just to be able to take them, shitty camera be damned.

http://www.cliqmo.co.uk

1. If you don’t know how to use; a semicolon; don’t. The semicolon is a tricksy little bitch. I only learnt the correct use a little while ago, and I’ve been working as a professional writer for several years now. I still don’t know if I’m always using it correctly. But what I do know is it isn’t something you use unless you’re totally sure you’re in the right. Oh, what the heck, stick it in where you like; you’re going to anyway.

2. It’s just not British to use ‘z’ quite so often. Microsoft Word is deceitful. It will betray you. You can set it to British English as many times as you like, but it will still change ‘organisation’ to ‘organization’ every single time. Be a little self-aware and notice auto changes; it will save your word slave no end of tedious find-and-replace activity.

3. Stop, putting fucking, commas, everywhere, please! Really, what makes you think that a single paragraph requires quite so many opportunities to pause and breathe?

4. We understand numbers as well as words, you know.
If your document is 59 pages long, don’t get us to agree to doing it by claiming ‘it’s only ten pages’. You will be found out about four seconds after we open the document, and then we’ll be even more bad-tempered than we already are on an average working day.

5. Don’t do the work yourself and not tell us.
We understand you’re busy, so how about a little understanding in return? We’re also familiar with the concept of deadlines: we have them too. Your deadlines become our deadlines. If at all possible, we will try and meet our deadline and therefore help you meet your deadline. But should said deadline suddenly creep too close for comfort, don’t think that damn lazy proofreader of yours is ignoring the work at hand and do a slapdash proofing job yourself – it’s just going to end in tears. Whose tears? Why, those of the proofreader, of course. And those tears will be of frustration, maybe even anger. There is nothing worse in our eyes than someone assigning work and then deciding to do it themselves without firing off an email to the word slave they’ve previously briefed, especially if you only let on once the completed job has been delivered to you.

We have long memories, you know. Don’t waste our precious time.

6. Just because we’re good with words, it doesn’t make us linguistic superheroes. When we get sent a document where the word count runs into the tens of thousands and see the immortal words ‘Can I get this back tomorrow?’ accompanying it, we hate you more than anyone else in the world. What you appear to have done is confuse a normal human being with 1980s hero and friend to racist depictions of Indians, Johnny 5. He may be able to devour massive texts in a matter of seconds, but we are blessed only with a slightly superior eye for comma abuse than you are. You’re mental if you think otherwise.

7. Have you forgotten what the fucking spellchecker is for? So you’ve finished your big presentation, hurray! What now? Well, at some point soon you’ll send it to be proofread, so in the meantime you read it through yourself and run the spellchecker for good measure, right? Of course you do. The spellcheck function is brilliant. Sure, it may tell you to put a z instead of an s, but it’ll pick up on your wildly incorrect spelling at the same time. Doing this takes two seconds and helps your proofreader no end. Oh, and it makes you look like less of a lazy jackass to boot. Bonus!

8. We understand numbers as well as words, you know. This one bears repeating. READ IT, REMEMBER IT: THIS ADVICE IS PRICELESS.

9. Send it when you say you will.
10am:
“I need this done ASAP, word slave! I have a presentation at 4 and I will send it at 1! Work through your lunch break to accommodate me! It’s coming at 1! Definitely at 1! I WILL DELIVER THIS WORK AT 1 AND I NEED IT BACK FOR 4!”

…

3.30pm:
“Sorry this is a little late. Can I still get it back for 4?”

No.

10. Say “thank you”.
Didn’t your parents teach you anything? If a proofreader has transformed your word jumble into a coherent piece of copy, have the common courtesy to thank your word slave for all their help. Getting paid is fine and dandy, but a little bit of appreciation goes an awful long way. We’re like bar staff: we’ll serve you quicker next round if you’re not an unappreciative toolbox the first time you want something from us. Two little words and a second of your time. Go on. Just try.

The first article I read on the Guardian site this morning was this snobbish column by Joe Queenan. He’s pissed off that the biggest grossing films of all time – the not-adjusted-for-inflation version – are all blockbusters. And worse than that, they all needed computers to make them work. GASP! SHOCK! BLOODY FUCKING NORA! He’s also pissed off that they were all funded by American money. Jesus.

Apparently, no-one makes films for people who were born before 1990 anymore, with the entire movie industry aimed at (are you ready for this?) “adolescents and tykes”:

“Hollywood doesn’t mind if grown-ups come in and see the films they make. But they’d much prefer it if they arrived with a bunch of kids. Theirs, or somebody else’s. Strays even, orphans: the industry is not fussy.”

And after blustering about The Youth (aka, the scourge of the modern world), he bemoans the fact that the likes of Jaws and Indiana Jones have been beaten off the list by the Avatar and Harry Potter. Oh yeah, cos those two films were intellectually weighty fucking epics, weren’t they? I really learned a lot watching a giant shark and Harrison Ford legging it from an enormous ball.

He also has a go at Titanic, bitching on about how it’s more about the love story than the sinking of the ship. NICE POINT! I BET NO-ONE’S ARGUED THAT BEFORE! Aside from the fact that moan has been done so many times it makes John Locke look lucky, it’s not even a justifiable one. I actually quite respect the choice James Cameron made with Titanic’s storyline, mainly because if you tried to make an audience care about a thousand people you would fail miserably. Make them care about two, maybe a handful more, and you get them to care about the others automatically. Jesus, is this guy really so stuffy that he can’t figure that one out for himself?

Here’s the thing: I like indie films. I like intellectual, stimulating, made-for-20p, depressing and dreary films starring bleak people dying alone. In fact, I fucking love them. However, I have also been known to like a blockbuster or two now and again. According to this guy, the fact I would happily pick Lord of the Rings as my desert island DVD (I can have all of them: my blog, my rules) means I’m a fan of films made for “teenagers, small children, and people who don’t want to grow up”; and you know what, that’s fine. I’d rather be labeled as someone who doesn’t want to grow up than to spend the rest of my short life as boring as this old duffer Joe Queenan.

Miserable wanker.

Check out the current list of pro-rape morons. See what kind of pockets you’re lining with your cinema tickets and DVD purchases. Think about how paying to see anything these people have made means you’re basically saying, “You’re alright, you. Sure, you think it’s okay to rape a 13-year-old girl and then make a break for the border before you have to serve real time for it, but hey, your film looks good. I’ll forgive you for your sickening loud-and-proud support of a child molester.”

Alternatively, you can just keep shovelling popcorn into your gob and forget that all those people think raping a child is basically a-okay because gosh, it was so long ago. One option is far easier than the other, but I’m not so sure anymore that enjoying films involving any of these people is worth the knowledge that I’m basically supporting their fucked moral compasses with my dollars and cents.

Which means I’ll never get to see Fantastic Mr Fox or find out who killed Laura Palmer. FUCKING HELL.

Like I said, it’s easier to enjoy stuff and ignore the moral implications, but sometimes the bigger picture is much more important.

Of course, looking at the Guardian blog on the show is just depressing, with pages and pages of miserable fucking eejits telling us the obvious: that it wasn’t for real. IT’S DERREN BROWN. Saying what he does isn’t always real is like saying the sky’s blue and expecting shock and awe in return for your revelation. You have to be a boring, cynical cunt not to get a little bit of pleasure out of the man’s work.

How can it not fill you with a childlike glee? Don’t these people remember that wonderful feeling of watching something magical as a kid and having no clue how it was achieved? That’s how Derren Brown makes me feel: like an awestruck, gobsmacked kiddie. I know he’s all about misdirection and suggestion, but the fun is letting go of your cynical adult sensibilities and just being entertained by his skill and wit.

I loved it. I love him. I will watch the show on Friday and find out how he did it, but I will treasure that Christmas Eve-feeling of giddy excitement I got last night far more.

There was a lot of discussion on the news in general about CCTV cameras, telling us yet again that we, the United Kingdom of Great Britain, are the most watched country in the known universe. Fascinating fact: the Shetland Islands, home to seven windswept fishermen and a lonely cow, have more CCTV cameras in operation than San Francisco. Insane. The London borough of Wandsworth has more than about 4 major world cities combined. (As an aside, one of the BBC presenters described it as “leafy”, a claim that some police dude from the area denied vehemently. Looking quickly at the map, Wandsworth includes, or is right next to, Roehampton, Wimbledon, Richmond and Parson’s fuckin’ Green. It’s so leafy it makes Hyde Park look like Pripyat.)

Since Nick Ross has all that Crimewatch experience, the BBC has clearly decided he is now an expert on crime in the UK. Y’know, after presenting something rather than working in the police force or one of the related government agencies or whatever. With that in mind, they asked him his opinion on the amount of CCTV cameras nowadays. His answer? I paraphrase slightly, but here’s the gist:

“They’re making it too easy for police. If someone’s running away, they can just see where to cut him off now, and it’s preventing them from thinking laterally.”

So that’s how you deal with crime in 2009! All along, they thought the frankly terrifying amount of technology we have sellotaped to street corners was helping catch the baddies, but really what it’s doing is slowing the intellectual faculties of police. When they have to run through the rainy streets of some depressing English town on a Saturday night, pursuing whichever goon’s just glassed someone for looking a bit funny at their missus, taking directions from a CCTV operator on where to cut them off, what they should be doing is solving a particularly tricky Sudoku puzzle and plotting the results on a complicated graph. THANKS, NICK ROSS!

They showed a clip from his show. It’s basically how I described above: Oxford, weekend, brawl, repeat to fade. In the clip they used, some guy legged it from a fight; when he was caught, he drunkenly wailed, “But I’m a TEACHER! I’m a TEACHER!”

Cut back to the studio and Ross sighing heavily at The State of Things Today. “That man was a teacher,” he moaned. “He was clearly very drunk and ran away from the police. Can you imagine someone like that being allowed to teach in our schools twenty years ago?”

Aaah, twenty years ago. The halcyon days of 1989, when tight-knit families sat around the wireless to listen to a crackly broadcast of Neighbours and everyone got together to have a great big cuddle at Hillsborough. And they knew how to prepare for a recession back in 1989! They put all our pre-economic collapse street parties in 2007 to shame!

It was just a better time. A better time we’ll never get back. *wipes away single tear*

Nick Ross for Prime Minister! The campaign starts here, right after I’m done punching the TV screen.

Sometimes, though, they’re just weird in their offerings. Take the spam I had from Easyjet yesterday, for instance. I’m flying with them to Amsterdam next month (still another three weeks away, mind), and they were kind enough to let me know I could still spend more money with them if I cared to. The exact text (with all the emphasis their own) was as follows:

Imagine arriving at the airport, using a dedicated check-in with a shorter queue and getting through the gate first so you can all sit together….

Wouldn’t that be a more relaxing way to start your family holiday?

Yeah, that sounds alright. Nothing to get excited about, but if you have seventeen brats and an incontinent granny to haul onboard I suppose it makes sense. Luckily, I’m neither laden with sprogs nor lacking in bladder control; and since I’m only travelling on a 45 minute flight, should I be separated from my two companions for that heinous length of time I’m sure I’ll just about cope without having a nervous breakdown.

As a result, I went to click ‘delete’ immediately and forget all about it. But the following line caught my eye before I hit the button:

Don’t just dream it, do it.

Is that what passes for a dream on Easyjet these days? The idea that you might be able to spend an extra fifteen minutes on their stuffy, cramped plane in order to sit next to people you know on a short-haul flight (which, in my plebeian boarding experience, has never been a problem, anyway)?

The only legitimate copy this line could have preceded without incurring my immediate scorn is as follows:

Imagine not being charged extra to check in a bag which you can’t carry onboard because of legislation hoping to prevent terrorism mid-flight. Imagine not having to fly at 4am because you can’t afford a flight at a reasonable time. Imagine not having your eyes assaulted the entire flight by uniforms in a violent shade of orange usually only worn by clean-up workers at a nuclear power plant post-disaster. Imagine not having to pay extra to avoid a violent scrum at the gate when boarding opens. Imagine never having to go to Stansted or Luton fucking Airport ever, ever, EVER again.

Ah, the power of dreams…

It was obvious a lot of people had attended a show there before, since they were smart enough to bring picnics to enjoy on the grass before everything kicked off. It was all very Pimms o’clock. At one point my boyfriend heard someone exclaim, “Xavier’s here!” Of course he is, and he’s jolly well bringing stuffed vine leaves for everyone!

The play itself was really very good, marred only by the people sat behind me. One of these days I’m going to be rich enough to go all Kermodian and buy all the seats around me so I’m never bothered by the general public. This time I was treated to a wonderful family of American tourists – a teenager, a mother figure and the dreaded Small Child. Oh joy.

They annoyed me from the off by chattering to the sprog about what was going on. I lasted about ten minutes before I couldn’t gnash my teeth any harder without grinding them to dust and turned around to shush. I found myself nose-to-nose with the Small Child, who was leaning forward in his seat. He received every last drop of my bile as I ordered him to be quiet. His eyes widened, and his mother nodded violently, pulling him back.

Luckily, this seemed to do the trick, and the sproglet sat in silence for the rest of the first half, but when the interval arrived the teenager decided to wank on about where they’d got to in the play. I was treated to what seemed like hours of his nasal musings because it took forever to get out of our respective rows. “We’re, like, at Act Three, Scene Two… No, maybe, like, Act Two, Scene One… No, like, I think it’s Act Four, Scene Three… Or it could be…” At this point I roundhouse-kicked his head square off his shoulders and we all agreed to disagree.

When the play began for the second half he once again forgot how to behave in public and spent a minute or so talking over the actors to explain what was going to happen to the sprog. Not just, “Oh, and now Juliet’s going to be ordered to marry Paris. Let’s see how that turns out, ho ho!” but a SYNOPSIS OF THE WHOLE PLAY FROM THAT POINT ON, from the proposal of forced marriage to the death of our heroes. I tried to have a sense of humour about it and muttered, “Aw, what? Spoiler warning!” The people next to me giggled, and I felt validated in my wrath.

Safe in the knowledge their idiot child knew exactly what was going to happen, they stayed silent till the end (which, incidentally, borrowed a little too much from Baz Luhrmann’s version but brought tears to my eyes regardless). Romeo had poisoned himself in a dramatic fashion and Juliet had shot her pretty little brains out. They lay draped over one another, their families wept and the Prince made his dramatic, “Now look what you’ve bladdy well gone and done!” speech. The Teenager clearly found the performance somewhat lacking, and at this final moment felt it necessary to start reciting the lines in a stage whisper, saying them just before the Prince did. Oh my god. OH MY GOD. And to add insult to injury, he got them wrong.

I’m still not sure why I let him live. Actually, I’m annoyed at myself for not having turned to him afterwards and told him that he’d ruined the end of the play for me. Because he did. Totally. I should have said something, but I just clung to my boyfriend and tried to let my anger disperse in a non-violent fashion.

I understand that my fury is probably disproportionate to the various crimes, but that said:

1) If your child is too young to understand or be entertained by Shakespeare, take him to see the fucking Lion King. That’s what it’s there for.
2) DO. NOT. TALK. DURING. A. PLAY. With it being outside the ambient noise was distracting enough (planes, a random air-horn, kestrels going WAGH! WAGH!), and I didn’t need twunts like you pulling me even more out of it.
3) If you know the play well enough to recite it, good for you. Save it for the home times, the special secret sexy times. No-one is impressed that you can quote Romeo and Juliet. Like a lot of people, I know great swathes of the play by heart after studying it at GCSE, but I didn’t feel the need to show off. They are the actors. You are the audience. Know your FUCKING place, dickhead, and shut the goddamn hell up.
4) I hate the general public.

The contestants went in tonight. Here are my earth-shattering and ridiculously judgemental first impressions.

Dennis, a 23-year-old dancer, is this year’s Token Gay. He looks like a bloated Pete Wentz. He combines his sexual preference with being exceptionally loud and smug. As such, all the women in the house are taking turns to drape themselves all over him so he can squeal how “hot” they are and how he’d totally snog them if he liked girls. I bet a fiver they’re showing him their tits by Sunday – it’s okay, you see, he’s gay. I bet another fiver he’s not actually gay.

Dale is the Token Misogynist. In his intro film he said, “If there’s fanny in there, I’ll nail it”. To be blunt, he’s the kind of guy you wish knob-rot on within minutes of meeting him.

Michael is the Token Disabled. Being blind, people are invariably dragging him around the house to make themselves look good or asking in braying tones if he’s “touched things with his hand”. I hope that he grows weary of this treatment and starts touching everything in far more antisocial ways, just to see how far he can push their tolerance. I especially look forward to the day he wipes his knob on everything, starting with the toaster and finishing with Dale’s horrible little face. Loses points for coming dressed as a goat herder. There’s no excuse for a poncho, not even profound blindness.

Darnell is the Token Psycho. His entrance to the house was, quite frankly, terrifying. He stomped around the walkways like a furious toddler denied a multipack of Yazoo at the supermarket, flinging his belongings at the crowd. I give him four days before he smashes the place up.

Kathreya is the Token Wacky Foreigner. Dressed as she is in a hot pink lamé romper suit and gold stacked trainers, she looks like a demented baby from the planet Disco. She carries around a jar of cookies everywhere and everyone seems to be avoiding her. She seems all right, apart from the fact she’s clearly a lunatic.

Then we have the Token Idiot Women. Jennifer, Rachel, Sylvia, Alexandra and especially the vomit-inducing Stephanie are the type of girls that make you ashamed to be female. In fact, they make you feel ashamed to be human. They all think they’re eminently fuckable and their smugness hangs around them like fuggy clouds of yuck. Dale has already ranked them in shag order. They all want to shag Dale.

Mario is the Token Dogger. His real name is Shaun and he wants his girlfriend Lisa (also in the house) to lose weight and have bigger tits. Oh, and to stop caring about her looks so much. Everytime I look at him I hear Alan Partridge in my head talking about the big barns farmers have that we’re not allowed to go into because they contain chickens with giant beaks. Mario looks like an experiment in the genetic modification of Matt Le Blanc gone wrong. He lives in one of Alan’s imaginary big sheds, confused, enormous and, because of his charming opinions on wife Lisa, utterly hate-worthy.

Lisa seems all right, as do Mohammed and Rex. BORING. Luke is clearly meant to be the Token Weirdo, but his I-Wear-Suits-I-Don’t-Drink wackiness is already tedious beyond belief. He’ll be out within a fortnight, as will Screamy Nutpiece Rebecca.

I bet all of you a shiny penny that Mohammed wins.

I’ve missed the last couple of years, much to my distress at the time, but this year I switched over just in time to see the UK take the stage and bore the arse off the viewing public with some instantly forgettable disco number. Brilliant. When Terry Wogan announced that our singer, Whatshisname McThingy, had done an amazing job, I couldn’t wait for Tels to be totally confounded when we went home with nil points again.

Which of course he was. We managed to avoid the horror of scoring nothing, but we still did shockingly, coming right at the bottom, and as always Wogan decided to spout on about political voting throughout the whole thing, as if certain countries really do vote for one another to make some sort of statement. I was writing my dissertation the first year we scored nothing (for a momumentally cack performance from the ones that sang out of tune, Blondetits and Wankface. You remember them, right? It was 2003, I think). Anyway, after that debacle certain people couldn’t wait to blame it on Labour. Our culture had gone to the dogs under Blair, crowed a Tory politician! Like Eurovision has ever been anything other than shite where we’re concerned.

When it comes to certain countries voting for one another, the so-called political voting – I have another theory. It’s really fucking out there, but bear with me, okay? Here it comes:

Other countries take the competition seriously.

Let me explain. We’ve been doing this for donkey’s years; since 1957, in fact. We’ve won a bunch of times and we always get our entries in, even if they sucked, thanks to the big fat cheque we pay the heads of Eurovision every year. However, a lot of countries are new to this song contest lark. In the last five years alone no fewer than thirteen new nations have started taking part. And you know why they want in in the first place? Because they actually care about being in it, and they care about winning. We don’t. We couldn’t give a fuck, truth be told. We don’t want to be beaten by Moldova or somesuch, but we don’t really care that much otherwise.

So imagine that all the ex-Soviet and Balkan countries care about the contest. They take several steps to ensure they do well:

1. Fame. They know it.
They pick someone well-known to represent them. Russia’s winning entrant this year, Dima Bilan, came second in the 2006 contest, and he’s a bloody great big star in his homeland. This guy is one of Russia’s biggest selling acts. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that if he’s big in Russia, he’s going to be somewhat of a name in places like Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Armenia et al. In short, check out his bloody big ready-made walloping gallumpha of a fanbase. Those people already love him. Those people will vote for him, even if his song is a turd. He even roped in Evgeni Plushenko, a world champion skater, to slide around him on Saturday night, and some dead popular violinist. In contrast, we have Splatty Thingyjim and his backing band of nobodies. Who gives a shit about Splatty Thingyjim? No-one, except maybe his mum. Who’s going to vote for him, besides his mum? No-one. Because no-one knows (or cares to find out) who Splatty Thinyjim is. Which leads us onto…

2. Promotion. They use it.
This is a simple one. If you want people to vote for your song, it needs to have stuck in their heads. Our entry failed because it was instantly forgettable. Then again, I can’t remember the Russian one either. However, I’m willing to bet hard cash that Dima Bilan promoted his arse off in the run up to the competition. That song would have been on radio and television all over eastern Europe. Why? Because they take it seriously. We, on the other hand, employ some X-Factor reject and poke them onstage at the last minute before throwing a cheery thumbs-up their way and running away giggling.

3. Music. They like it.
Terry Wogan, eh? What a funny chap. ‘Oh ho!’ he crows, ‘This is going to be rubbish!’ over every single slightly ethnic sounding track. I’m quite happy to giggle at the utter rubbish some countries send into the contest – Spain excelled themselves this year with new levels of bonkers arsewankery – but on occasion his commentary borders on xenophobia.

Take the half-time entertainment this year, for instance, provided by the amazing Goran Bregovic. If you love a little eastern European brass madness, go buy some of this guy’s records. I had no idea he was due to appear, but I was delighted when I heard his name. It was such a brilliant addition, and such a surprise – one comment on YouTube phrased it perfectly: “I didn’t expect to see him there at all. Brega playing in Eurovision is like Stanley Kubrick showing up at your high school’s amateur film festival”. I may well have clapped my hands in delight. Wogan sneered at it all, of course, but I expected him to shut up after a few seconds. He didn’t. He talked over almost the entire thing, and even when he wasn’t sniping, he had the sound turned down, so we couldn’t hear the music either way. I was so frustrated and angry I wanted to cry.

Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I’ve been able to watch Bregovic and his band back at my leisure, and it was bloody worth it, I tell you – check it out for yourself:

The point is, what the fuck does Terry Wogan know about music from this area of the world? Nothing whatsoever, if he chose to talk over Bregovic. And really, most of us won’t be familiar with the trends of the music industry in every country in the world, unless we’re a bone-fide expert (or, probably, Stephen Fry). So he can talk over the entries all he likes, but I’m going to go out on yet another limb and guess that many of the entries are styles of music very popular with people from that part of the world. They like it. They vote for it. They’re less keen on limp and self-consciously camp disco from the UK. They don’t vote for it. It’s a simple system, and has fuck all to do with politics.

If you combine all of these elements, you’re onto a winner. Sorry Terry, it’s got nothing to do with Iraq. We’re just shit at this.

As a side note, my favourite entry was the ridiculous song from Bosnia & Herzegovina. The version on the night was much weirder – no chicken, but a washing line and loads of brides – but this one still delights me. I found myself genuinely liking the song, and it’s the perfect example of why I like Eurovision so much. Who knows what utter weirdness is going to make it onto your iPod?