...and Javine has won! Well, she has won the vote amongst Turkish Eurovision fans at the Turkish OGAE fanclub meeting. Result! Of course, if you enter a Turkish-sounding song, you'd have to be pretty worried if it wasn't appealing to Turkish fans, but let's not be dismissive. Javine's song is also very popular on a Greek fansite, and last night she performed it to a mainly Greek/Cypriot crowd in London, along with Constantinos, this year's Cypriot entrant. It's almost unheard of for any other countries' singers to perform their songs in the UK prior to the contest, but tonight we have another one, with Albania's Ledina Celo also performing in London. More of this please!

Not such good news for Javine from Russia though, where OGAE Russia also had their vote over the weekend, with the UK not featuring in their top ten. They've gone for the Estonian girlband Vanilla Ninja to win instead. That's Switzerland's entry, not Estonia's, for those who haven't been paying attention at the back.

It's interesting to note the six songs that appear in the top tens of both countries. (Well I think it's interesting, although probably pointless, but let's do it anyway.)

Greece: 2nd & 3rd
Iceland: 3rd & 4th
Hungary: 4th & 6th (carrying the burden of Chig's money, lest we forget)
Switzerland: 5th & 1st
Romania: 6th & 9th
Spain: 10th & 2nd

This would seem to justify UK bookies William Hill having Greece as the favourite, at the ridiculously short odds (before we've even seen any rehearsals) of 9/4. Whether or not Helena wins for Greece, I have a feeling that she will get 10 or 12 points from the UK, with Sweden being the other country in the UK's top two.

A little birdie told me that Irish fans had a get-together in Dublin a couple of weeks ago. I can hardly believe my source, but I'm told that Finland was voted as their favourite this year. Seeing as Finland's godawful song, 'WAAAAAAAH!'* is battling for 37th place (out of 39) in Chig's list of favourites, I can only assume that the Irish fans got bored and/or drunk and picked the winner out of a hat.

*It's actually called 'Why?', but you wouldn't know it.


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