We won the cold war, but it means we can never win Eurovision

So I watched Eurovision last Saturday.

I know it's not the coolest of cool things and I'm not watching because I enjoy "camp" stuff particularly, but as Terry Wogan says, it's always a good chance to laugh at Johnny Foreigner.

We came last.

Now this isn't new - in the last few years we've come either last or very near the bottom every time. But there was a legitimate reason for that - our songs were shite and deserved to do badly.

However, this year's song was okay. Eurovision is never the height of musical endeavour, but as pop songs go it wasn't half bad. It was also well performed and fairly anthemic, which often does well at Eurovision.

But only two countries voted for us - Ireland, who you might call our only neighbours, and San Marino, which, I would guess, contains a fair few British ex-pats. (But then saying that, Malta didn't even vote for us and that's basically an actual part of Britain - I don't quite get that one.)

Anyway, the problem this year is that the voting has become all skewed and messed up. Don't get me wrong, the voting's always been political, it's just that now it's gotten silly.

Previously it didn't matter if Norway always voted for Sweden and vice-versa, because there weren't that many neighbours to vote for and so the half-decent songs would tend to rise to the top because they'd still get decent marks from Sweden and Norway, just not the top marks.

Now, there are so many former Soviet satellite countries that they all vote for each other to such a degree (not just the top votes, but all the votes) that nobody else stands a snowball's chance in hell. Plus there's an added issue in this new structure.

Every year the French never vote for us. Because they don't like us. This issue has been magnified over too. If Russia and Western Europe are at odds (e.g. they've assassinated someone in our country), the Soviet-satellites aren't going to vote for us for that reason too, so it's a double-whammy.

The real winner this year was Greece, as they consistently got the most votes, and, of the 'traditional' Eurovision countries, those like Greece that are maybe a bit more 'neutral' are the the only non-Soviet-satellites that might win it. But clearly the word had gone out this year that Russia had to win, so they just couldn't overcome the onslaught of high marks Russia got.

As I say, Eurovision has never not been political, and there's always bizarreness, but when you put in a perfectly decent, well-performed song and you come dead-last it just rankles a bit.

And I wouldn't mind, but Eurovision is paid for by the European Brodacasting Union (EBU) and we (along with a couple of the other old-skool countries) are the ones that actually pay for it.

So we pay a fortune for the ex-Commies to tell us just how much they don't like us!

I think a solution would to proportionalise the voting more. Most of these countries are tiny and yet their votes count for as many points as ours do.