World of Chig   

27.5.05

..and today, if your name is Graham and you run this Eurovision website, you are indeed, in the words of Marie N, a weener. Congratulations! (As a knight of the realm once sang.) Yes, Graham was the first person to answer all five fiendishly difficult questions correctly in the World Of Chig Eurovision quiz. Fiendishly difficult because at least two of the answers were only witnessed by a handful of people, so you couldn't possibly be expected to know, but well done to everyone who made a guess.

So, a copy of the Andorran single will be winging its way to Graham. (E-mail me your address please - via 'Contact Me' in the sidebar.) That means, of course, that I still have a spare copy of the bloody Russian single. There's only room for one shockingly ungrammatical single in this house, so I will have to devise another way to get rid of it. Watch this space.

Here are the correct answers:

1) As the Irish delegation was driven into Kyiv on their first day, what made Joe McCaul cheer out loud when he saw it at the side of the road?

a) An advert for Milky Bars
b) A can of Guinness
c) A billboard advert for Eurovision
d) A McDonalds

I was lucky enough to be on the shuttle bus which took all fourteen members of the Irish delegation from the airport to their hotel. Just me and them, and very nice they were too. Little Joe whooped with delight when, amongst the mega-tower blocks which line the roads in the Kyiv suburbs, he spotted the McDonalds.


2) What was actually shown on screen during Saturday’s final at the moment when they should have been showing the Klitschko brothers closing the voting?

a) Ruslana
b) The presenters
c) President Yushchenko
d) The floor

All that rehearsal, for very little screen time. The director forgot to switch the camera to the brothers as they banged that stupid instrument to end the voting. Instead, we got the camera shot which was supposed to be next, with the hapless presenters looking bored as they thought they were off camera. A huge disappointment and a damn shame, particularly for the crowds watching with me in Independence Square, who had only caught a glimpse of their heroes a few minutes before and never saw them properly on screen again.

3) Which word; an adjective referring to a specific country, featured in the lyric of TWO songs from Thursday’s qualifier, one of which won a place in the final and one which didn't?

Unusually, the word 'Indian' cropped in two songs; Estonia's and Moldova's. "I'm hot like Indian spice," sang Suntribe, who didn't get through. Prior to the contest, it sounded like she was singing, "I'm hot like Ginger Spice," which was quite amusing. Moldova sang, "She's flying into trance like an Indian shaman."

4) Which singer, in a press conference last week, said, of their former career, “I taught…teached…English”?!

It was Denmark's Jakob Sveistrup, much to the amusement of the Danish bloke who was sitting next to me. It's easy to laugh at foreigners making mistakes in English, and we don't encourage it, but the context was deliciously ironic. Jakob was absolutely lovely, especially when we had a chat at the opening party. As I told him, the thing I really liked about the way he spoke is that he speaks English with an English accent, not American, which made a lovely change after hearing so many singers who seemed to have learnt English by listening to American MTV.


5) Which of Saturday’s singers has already been asked by the BBC if they would consider representing the UK, and has said ‘yes’?

Yes, she really has, but don't hold your breath. No timescale was set. It was just a statement of willingness, should the situation ever arise. I think we should take her up on it though, maybe in a couple of years. Failing that, we scour Europe for a power ballad and a female singer from the Balkans, or we're forever doomed.

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