monaco gp & eurovision

It was the Monaco Grand Prix this last weekend.

As I was saying on Friday the Monaco Grand Prix can be terribly dull and I'm afraid to say this weekend's race didn't really thrill me.  The problem really came down to the issue that overtaking at Monaco is incredibly difficult.

At the end of the race there were 5 of the top drivers all lined up behind Webber and none of them really had a go at overtaking.  It was also very long.  Street circuits tend to produce long races because, although the tracks are often short so they do lots of laps but the speeds are low and so they take ages.

I actually nearly fell asleep at one point, though I have to admit that was also partly due to the fact I was up late and had a few frothy bevvies the night before.

The race did produce a new record, though; in that we've had six different drivers win all six of the races so far.  There is a good side to this in that it means the championship is all really close, but I have to say it's a bit too random for my liking.

While it's not good when you have 1 driver and team that utterly dominates, I'm also not really enjoying this situation where 1 race one team is dominant and then the next race they're crap and someone else is utterly dominant.  I'm hoping when they work the tyres out a bit more then things will settle down a bit.

The reason for the late night drinking was Eurovision.  It snuck up a bit on me this year, actually.  I don't ever remember it clashing with Monaco before - perhaps they've moved it because of the Jubilee and Olympics (the BBC is one of the core organisations of the European Broadcasting thing that puts it together)?

Anyway, because of it sneaking up I actually recorded it and watched it on delay.  This proved advantageous as the show was incredibly long.  The worst part of it now is the voting, which takes an hour and a half because there are forty-odd countries involved (they also have semi-finals nowadays so that only 26 songs appear on the final night) and once it became clear that the UK wasn't in contention I really skimmed through the voting at high speed.

Our result wasn't surprising - the song was a ballad and okay but quite lumpy.  It was also sung by Engelbert Humperdinck and while he gave it his all it was clearly just an old man singing an okay song.  I'm not sure fit eh plan was to pick up the grey vote, but if so it was a bit flawed as I think it's mainly young people that actually vote.

This is evidenced by the fact that the winner was an unashamed piece of Europop.  If it had been on Radio 1 and the DJ had said it had been written by David Gueta you wouldn't have been surprised.

The thing I was mainly thankful for was that the Russian Grannies didn't win.  It was a truly awful and quite cynical on some levels attempt to garner votes and it did well, but thankfully some people saw sense.  I think it probably helps on that front that each country has a team of judges as well as the telephone vote.