23:30 Ne, Hrvatska, ne, ne, ne! Croatia, what were you thinking?

Tonight's Dora final was...how can I put this? 'Crap' would be a good word. 'Laughable' would be another. The winning song, by one point over something which would have been mildly acceptable, was a song by a grizzled old Iggy Pop-like rocker with some meandering, growling rubbish. Watch the performance here, if you dare. You wait three minutes for the song to start, and then it ends. Mercifully.

Last year's Croatian Eurovision entry, Moja štikla by Severina, was my favourite of all the songs, and still is, so it was a pleasure to see her performing it at the start of tonight's show, live from the Crystal Ballroom of the Hotel Kvarner in Opatija. But it was all downhill from there onwards. (One of our friends, who would otherwise have been with us tonight, was actually there at the final. I hope he has asked for his money back.)

At Glitterball Mansions, we cast our votes in the interval, as did the population of Croatia. Thirteen of us, including, for a bit of variety, a woman and a Belgian. (Not the same person.) In our vote, 'Vjerujem u ljubav' by Dragonfly featuring Dado Topic came 15th out of the sixteen songs. In Croatia, it won. What do we know?

Our voting was more 'all over the place' than I can ever recall tonight. Because there wasn't anything good, there was no consensus at all, and some songs were scoring 12s from some people and none from others. I was accused of voting for the singer, rather than the song, when I gave my douze points to Luka Nižetić, but his was the most watchable performance, of a very average song. He was looking like a sexier version of Daniel Bedingield tonight, but with dyed black hair, piled up a bit, making me think of Tom Bailey at the height of The Thompson Twins' fame. It's not his best look. Here he is, doing tonight's song on another show. He wore a different outfit tonight - a black suit - but you get the idea.



The narrow winner chez nous was a bizarre novelty song called 'No chance sugar'. This consisted of a fat woman (and I mean massive) singing in an opera stylee, while fending off the attentions of two blokes. I think that was the gist of it anyway. Some people found it funny, which it was, but it was funny bad, not funny good. The act was called Trio Fantasticus, but the Croatian televoters agreed with me that they were far from fantasticus and mostly ignored them. Oh blimey, blame YouTube, not me. Here they are, on another programme, but they looked exactly like this tonight. How horrible is this?



Croatia is now fighting with Israel for 'worst entry of the year so far' in my list. They're both absolutely awful, but the Israeli one is a least controversial, so well done Croatia, I think you've clinched it. May the spirits of Doris Dragović and Danijela Martinović haunt you from now until May as you reflect on your useless choice tonight. Book your flights home from Helsinki for 11 May, because you ain't gonna be in that final on the 12th.

Labels: Croatia, Dora, Dragonfly, Eurovision 2007, Luka Nižetić

· link