The run up to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest has begun. Many countries have already chosen their songs and singers. We know the UK’s song will be written by Dennis Pete Waterman. And this got me wondering: which songs from last year’s competition have faded into (even greater) obscurity and which are still being listened to?

There are a handful of tracks from last year that still come into my head occasionally. The winner, Fairytale; Ukraine’s Be My Valentine; Hungary’s pretty unsuccessful Dance With Me; Slovenia’s Love Symphony; Sweden’s La Voix. But what about the rest of the world who aren’t me?

Fortunately, there’s a way to get an idea. last.fm is a website that keeps track of your listening habits, if you so desire. It has thousands of users and it’s possible to look up the listening figures for any given track. So I’ve gone through last year’s entries and counted up the number of plays each has had in the last six months.

Before I give you the results, there are some caveats. For a start, it’s not going to be an objective measure of the songs themselves as the results of the Contest will skew the figures. The winner in particular had lots more exposure as a result, and the songs that didn’t progress from the semi-finals weren’t broadcast to the same audience as the final. Also, I’m aware that the songs I’ve played have tended to be served up by the shuffle feature on my iPod – so those listens are less about those songs being high quality than not being bad enough for me to have skipped to the next track. Plus, there’s no record of which country these listens came from – most could be in the entry’s home country (they couldn’t vote for it during the show) and the size of the last.fm user base in each country will make a difference.

Then there’s the problem of disambiguation. Not least because of the different languages involved, but also because of the generally inconsistent taxonomies of people’s audio collections, tracks are listed on last.fm under variations of their titles and variations of their artist. And it’s case sensitive. For example, Ukraine’s entry appears separately under

• Be My Valentine by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine (Anti-crisis girl) by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine! (Anti-Crisis Girl) by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine! (Anti-crisis Girl) [Ukraine] by Svetlana Loboda
• Be my Valentine (Anti-crisis girl) by Светлана Лобода

and more. I’ve mostly taken all the entries among the 15 top tracks shown by default on the artist page. This works against singers who’ve had lots of other hits under the same name (or who share their name with another group), so where the impact of that was large I’ve looked further down the list to include more plays. I’ve attempted to go through all the obvious variations of artist names – so for “A & B” I also looked up “A feat. B”, “A feat B”, “A and B”, and “A”. I’ve included remixes, radio edits and different translations of the songs.

That all said, here are the results of the people-still-listening-to-Eurovision-2009-entries jury.

Position	Actual final position	Country	Listens
1	1	Norway	25,850
2	2	Iceland	6,602
3	6	Estonia	4,860
4	5	United Kingdom	4,545
5	25	Finland	4,501
6	4	Turkey	3,954
7	3	Azerbaijan	3,716
8	8	France	3,691
9	20	Germany	3,125
10	21	Sweden	2,524

…which suggests that the Europe-wide voting public got it roughly right.

It’s no surprise that Alexander Rybak is in first place by miles, averaging six listens an hour by last.fm users in the last six months. Iceland’s second place in the competition is also accurately reflected by the listening figures – less predictably – and France’s Patricia Kaas appears in 8th place in both the results and the listening figures.

The songs that seem to have been more popular than their results suggested are from Estonia, the UK, and in particular Germany and Sweden. Turkey and Azerbaijan are a little lower in the listener counts. Finland’s entry Lose Control by Waldo’s People, deserves a special mention: it came last in the Eurovision final but is the 5th most listened to. Although this could be the result of last place notoriety, it’s more likely genuine success, either restricted to their home country or, given the style of the song, in the Eurodance world.

The three songs that finished in the top 10 on the night but not in this chart are Greece’s This Is Our Night (four places lower), Bosnia & Herzegovina’s Bistra Voda (nine places lower, although I rather liked it), and Armenia’s Jan Jan (a whopping 14 places lower). The highest placed semi-finalist who didn’t make the final was (appropriately) The Highest Heights, Switzerland’s entry, which is the 19th most popular entry of the last six months.

So there you go. Pseudo-scientific. Passably interesting.

This year’s Eurovision final is on Saturday 29th May, with the semi-finals on Tuesday 25th and Thursday 27th. I’ll probably return in May with a preview – and I’ll attempt to successfully follow-up last year’s post, where, for the first time ever, I successfully predicted the winner.

I don’t send round robin letters with my Christmas cards. I don’t usually manage to send Christmas cards. But if I did send cards and if I did include a letter, the tradition would be to brag about how my kids are doing so well in school and how gorgeous our new kitchen is.

Failing that, I thought I’d have a quick look back at some of the stuff that happened to me me me me me this year. I thought it might be cathartic. For me. Me me me. (Links to Twitpics where appropriate.)

January

I took part in the first round of the Laughing Horse New Act Competition. I made it through to the quarter finals, which was nice. Thank you to the big gaggle of people who came along to support me. One of those was Michael of the thomyk podcast. Oh yes, I’ve been doing stand-up. Not sure I’ve mentioned that on the blog before. So yes.

I am relying on my Google Calendar, which tells me that nothing else of interest happened in January.

February

Things started hotting up in February when a toffee removed one of my fillings. There followed quite a lot of visits to the dentist and, after the second attempt to install it, a new gold filling. I now genuinely hear a ding! whenever I smile.

February was also the month of a night at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill (acts included this ukulele band); of Twestival, where I met Thom of the thomyk podcast; and of my quiet retirement from the Lib Dem Voice editorial team.

March

Mid-March was the quarter final of the Laughing Horse competition. That time I didn’t get through to the next round. Ah well. The competition is back in 2010 and I’m taking part again. I should probably take a similar perseverance approach to Mastermind – I had my unsuccessful audition in March too.

At the beginning of the month, I went grave hunting not far from where I live and finally tracked down my great-grandmother’s grave marker in an overgrown and badly kept part of Camberwell New Cemetery.

At the end of the month was Barcamp London 6, a geeky unconference held at the lovely theguardian offices in King’s Cross. I gave a talk on politics and twitter. I’m afraid it was rather dull.

April

April was the biggest making-stuff-to-go-on-the-internet month. The first weekend saw the 2009 48 Hour Sci-Fi Film Challenge, in which my team produced the short Pressure Valve in less than two days. As part of that, I met Billy from the internet.

At the end of the month, with Michael on one of his many overseas jaunts, I joined Thom as a stand-in host of the thomyk podcast. In retrospect, that episode talks rather too much about Michael Jackson.

April was also the first and currently last time I played squash. Yes, squash.

May

May was quite a big month. I turned 30 and celebrated/commiserated with a karaoke bash. I do love karaoke. Helen gave me a ukulele for my birthday which, as YouTube will testify, may have been a tactical error.

It was a good Eurovision Song Contest this year: lots of entertainment during the final came from twitter and I won £30 for correcting predicting Norway’s victory.

I did the last comedy gig of my twenties, which was a fundraiser for the film Booked Out. It went well and premiered a New Joke. The month rounded off with a rather fun 40th birthday bash featuring one song from each of the last 40 years.

June

Following an internal reorganisation at work, I changed jobs immediately after June’s European elections. I visited Google’s London HQ for a seminar and hosted a fundraising quiz for the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. The timing of the local election results meant I missed the Liberty AGM, despite having partly joined a year earlier so that Chris would know someone else there. Thanks to a plea going out on twitter from director Ben Miller and star Noel Clarke, I spent a couple of days in Kilburn as an extra in their new film Huge.

Judging from my diary, it was around June that our local pub quiz team formed, a loose collection of regulars and occasional quizzers who would win every week if only the questions were restricted to one particular TV show. And I’m glad it did because it’s given me lots of nice evenings in the pub with a lovely group of people, all of whom I’ve got to know better as a result.

July

Having missed the Greenwich Beer Festival, the Ealing Beer Festival and July’s Karaoke Circus at the 100 Club, July’s best moment was Blur in Hyde Park, a brilliant afternoon/evening/night where I bumped into a whole load of old friends. I also did my first gig outside London, at the Birdcage in Norwich, thanks to host Dan McKee.

Travelling back to the capital by car, I stopped at a service station and picked up a copy of Your Family Tree magazine. I’d never bought the magazine before but I thought the article on podcasting might be interesting. Turned out I was in it.

August

In August, I continued what turned out to be a whole year’s run of missing beer festivals by failing to go to the Great British Beer Festival. I returned to my former home of Leeds for a wedding and made suitable noises as the taxi drove past places I recognised and other appropriate noises when things had closed down or been built. I also went to see Nick on the Fourth Plinth.

I made my annual pilgrimage to the Edinburgh Fringe and saw lots of shows, highlights being those by Richard Herring, Tim Key, The Penny Dreadfuls, William Andrews and Robin Ince. I also did a couple of gigs on the Free Fringe. One of them I’ll be professional and refrain from commenting on; the other was a last minute guest slot in Alan Sharp’s show, complete with minute or two of new material, which was lots of fun to do and probably my best gig so far.

September

A busy first week in September included Hackney for the Reece Shearsmith’s Haunted House radio recording; a trip along the District Line on a 1938 Tube train with Helen (her video); and Lloyd Woolf’s Buy a Weatherperson a Drink Party, where I met the lovely Anna, Simone and James, and the Chief Exec of the Royal Meterological Society.

Derren Brown returned to the TV with his lottery predictions and, through the inadvertent magic of search engine optimisation, I got thousands of views on my Derren Brown lottery song. This was also the subject of my contribution to the first episode of new podcast The Pod Delusion.

Because of who I work for, the big thing in September was always going to be a busy week in Bournemouth for party conference. My main memory is being press ganged into doing stand-up in a hotel bar for our department’s end-of-conference get together and being slightly put off when the new Chief Exec wandered in halfway through. I talked more about party conference in the Pod Delusion’s second episode.

September also saw the second Plinther I went to see in person: the other Will Howells (no relation). Annoyingly, I had to leave for conference a few hours before Mike took the plinth.

October

Michael took the Plinth in October – an early start to a long day that ended with a rare trip clubbing. The following day I went to Dr Debbie’s very interesting talk on Thatcher. I took a leap of faith and upgraded to an iPhone; a week later I was at Broadcasting House for the recording of the Penny Dreadfuls’ Guy Fawkes radio play fumbling to work out how to switch it off. With Michael off on holiday as soon as he had deplinthed, I made a second guest visit to the thomyk podcast to not talk about Trafigura. In other podcast news, I contributed to the third episode of the Pod Delusion and was guest host of episode five.

I went along to Barcamp London 7 and gave an interactive talk on things that annoy me, which seemed to go down much better than my previous talk. Best moments of October though were Mr and Mrs Morris’s lovely wedding and my first visit to the glorious Karaoke Circus, where, amongst others, I met Paul and Kate.

November

November featured my doomed attempt at NaNoWriMo; a great gig from Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm; Robin Ince’s CD recording; a very funny debut show from Los Quatros Cvnts; more karaoke; more stand-up; a trip to the Bletchley Park fundraiser Boffoonery, where I won a painting; my most recent contribution to the Pod Delusion, on the subject of the Large Hadron Collider; and more. Which might explain why my NaNoWriMo was doomed.

December

Karaoke Circus returned for a brilliant Christmas show at the beginning of December. Lots of great acts though my favourite was Tony Gardner and Ben Miller’s recreation (here it is on YouTube) of Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s awful Little Drummer Boy. I apparently channelled a cross between Sonny Bono and the Boston Strangler for I Got You Babe.

I went to Stewart Lee’s very good new show and the last two episodes of As It Occurs to Me, which – good news – will return next year. I went to Wales and discovered that the Cardiff councillor I was chatting to in the pub is a (very) distant relation. I enjoyed this year’s 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People and in particular Alan Moore, despite never having read anything he’s written. I went to the Royal Albert Hall for the first time and sang Christmas songs and then it was Christmas and stuff, with my own Christmas message and the thomyk pantomime.

Fillums

At locations as diverse as the BFI IMAX, the Prince Charles in Soho, a local pub theatre and Bad Film Club at the Barbican, this year I saw Watchmen, Star Trek, Bats, Harry Potter and Whatever the Sixth One’s Called, Milk and Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. I also went to the premiere of State of Play. Milk is probably the best of those and, rarely, a film that actually changed my behaviour: I don’t think I’d have gone to the moving vigil against homophobic violence in Trafalgar Square in October if I hadn’t seen the film a few weeks previously.

Bye bye, 2009

Turns out I’ve done rather more than I remembered. And that was quite cathartic, if a bit egocentric. In retrospect, 2009 was a much more positive, productive year than I’d given it credit for. And as for 2010 – well it’s up to us, isn’t it?

August isn’t the most topical month for a Eurovision Song Contest posting. At May’s content, juries were reintroduced to combat allegations of political voting, with each country’s votes being decided half by phone vote and half by a jury of “industry experts”.

The European Broadcasting Union has now revealed what the results would have been if voting had been by jury only. Norway would still have won, although not by as huge a margin. Here are the jury and actual votes side-by-side.

Position	Jury votes	Telephone votes	Actual result
1	Norway (312)	Norway (378)	Norway (387)
2	Iceland (260)	Azerbaijan (253)	Iceland (218)
3	United Kingdom (223)	Turkey (203)	Azerbaijan (207)
4	France (164)	Iceland (173)	Turkey (177)
5	Estonia (124)	Greece (151)	United Kingdom (173)
6	Denmark (120)	Estonia (129)	Estonia (129)
7	Turkey (114)	Bosnia & Herzegovina (124)	Greece (120)
8	Azerbaijan (112)	Russia (118)	France (107)
9	Israel (107)	Armenia (111)	Bosnia & Herzegovina (106)
10	Greece (93)	United Kingdom (105)	Armenia (92)

The most notable difference from a UK perspective is that the music industry experts put us two positions up, in third place. Perhaps they were more likely to be sympathetic to a Lloyd Webber track than Europe’s wider population? Phone voting alone would have placed the UK tenth.

Both Greece and Turkey – upbeat tracks with strong performances on the night – found more favour with the audience than with the juries, while France’s ballad and Israel’s “worthy” entry reach the juries’ top ten, but not the audiences’.

The EBU has also released full country-by-country breakdowns of the voting. The UK scored six 12s from juries, but only one by phone vote (and only one on the night). Here’s how the votes cast by the UK through telephone vote and jury vote compared.

Points	Jury votes	Telephone votes	Actual votes
12	Germany	Turkey	Turkey
10	Iceland	Greece	Norway
8	Norway	Lithuania	Iceland
7	Malta	Norway	Germany
6	Turkey	Malta	Malta
5	Ukraine	Iceland	Greece
4	France	Azerbaijan	Lithuania
3	Bosnia & Herzegovina	Denmark	Azerbaijan
2	Armenia	Germany	Ukraine
1	Azerbaijan	Portugal	France

I’m surprised to see that Germany’s swing number topped the UK’s jury vote – but the jury was outvoted by the audience, who managed to get the 12 points for Turkey while placing Germany ninth. Norway’s strong performance on both lists contrived to place it second overall, higher than on either. Again, Greece fared much better with the telephone voters, as did Lithuania, Denmark and Portugal.

If you take a similarly geeky interest in how the votes from each country were affected, you can download the full voting data from the Eurovision website.

The Eurovision Song Contest is nearly upon us, so I have taken the bullet for you and watched videos of all of this year’s entries on the BBC Eurovision website. If you visit the site, do take a look at some of the breathtakingly sincere contestant biographies – for example this gem from Russia.

If you want detail and musical insight, Jon Jacob has reviewed the songs much more thoroughly than I have – I’m going to limit myself to a sentence or two for each. (For some even shorter comments, see Mike’s tweet-splurge.) I’ll also try to avoid commenting on the videos as we’d be here all night (some of them deserve posts of their own), but it’s hard not to let my view of the songs be swayed by them.

By way of introduction, I should add that, in this hyperconnected modern world, it’s possible that at least one of the entrants might Google for themselves and end up on this page only to find me being less than positive, so: if you catch me being mean about your song, don’t take offence – everyone else in Europe might like it.

I apologise in advance for my limited critiquing vocabulary, which will likely result in the overuse of some words and phrases, in particular: catchy, OK, nothing special, fun, dull, enough, Europop, forgettable, key change, better than X’s usual standard.

The Good
The songs that caught my eye, in alphabetical order:

• Estonia – Some nice strings, effective backing vocals and a strong rhythm drive this atmospheric track. A dark horse. (10th favourite on Betfair.)
• Germany – Germany goes swing and ends up with their best Eurovision song in goodness knows how long. Not a fan of the silly bit in the middle, but there’s a key change!
• Greece – What’s this? Sakis Rouvas is back! 2004’s third placed Greek entrant (he was robbed) and 2006 co-host is once again representing Greece. It’s a fairly standard dancy pop track – I prefer Shake It from five years ago – but not worse for it. Could be in with a chance (and it’s the 2nd favourite on Betfair).
• Hungary – Sakis is given a run for his money by Hungary’s own dancy pop from Zoli Ádok, which is a little catchier (although possibly only because the version on the BBC site was about a minute longer than it’s allowed to be on the night). Oh, I know I said I wouldn’t comment on videos but Hungary’s is the campest of the lot.
• Norway – Habitual Eurovision failures attempt to claw back some credibility with a child-faced male Norwegian Vanessa Mae. Alexander Rybak wrote the theme tune and sings the theme tune and I can see it getting lots of actual points. (Bookies’ favourite on Betfair.)
• Slovenia – More strings, with Quartissimo – a string quartet Il Divo – centre stage with Martina Majerle. It may be a bit of a gimmick but when did that ever cost you votes at Eurovision?
• Sweden – You will see further down that I diss pop opera when Bulgaria did it, but Malena Ernman kind of pulls it off. Will be interesting if it catches the imagination of the audience, ‘cos if it does… (8th on Betfair.)
• Ukraine – And nestling away in the penultimate position was this pleasant surprise. A fresh sounding production for a strong song. (5th on Betfair.)

Also worth a mention here are Belgium (with a traditional Belgian Rockabilly track that’s strangely endearing), Croatia (pretty good, as sweeping Eurovision ballads go), Ireland (girl guitar pop delivers Ireland’s first decent song in years), Montenegro (unexpectedly upbeat, energetic and fun), and Spain (another nation’s strongest song in some years, La Noche es Para Mi is a down-the-line euro dance thing so there’s something stiff competition for the down-the-line euro dance thing bloc)

The Bad
The trend for there to be relatively few abysmal entrants continues (disappointly). Nevertheless, there are some:

• Czech Republic – First (and only?) properly off the wall act of the year. Alas, can’t see this having any success.
• Denmark – Denmark’s answer to Ronan Keating turns in a song that’s only slightly more interesting than your average Ronan Keating track. (The correct answer to Ronan Keating is “Sorry, there’s no-one here at the moment.”) And after making that observation, I learnt from Jon Jacob’s blog that this song was actually co-written by Ronan Keating. That. Explains. Everything.
• Netherlands – OK, so whose idea was it to squeeze some permatanned middle-aged men who seem strangely familiar but who you know you’ve never seen before into white suits and give them a silly light ray special effect on their hands? And let them record a song? And then put Obama in the video? Sheesh.
• Serbia – I think there may have been an administrative mix-up. The Serbian entry appears to be a Two Ronnies sketch. (OK, it’s not that bad, but this section would be quite threadbare without it.)

The Boring
Some songs don’t particularly have anything wrong with them, but you still want them to be over please:

• Bulgaria – I am not, in turns out, a fan of pop opera. Sorry, Bulgaria. I’m as disappointed as you are.
• Israel – Just as you thought we might be spared Eurovision’s traditional outbreak of lyrical peace, love and understanding, Israel saves the day. All very worthy but I’ll be checking my watch for the next act with sequins.
• Lithuania – Oh, it’s another worthy ballad. Next.
• FYR Macedonia – Macedonia’s Bon Jovi fail to grab the attention with their dreary rock song.
• Poland – My lazy comparison for Poland’s Lidia Kopania is Christina Aguilera. Dull ballad.
• Portugal – Nice to see the band enjoying themselves. I wish I could say the same for myself. Still, nice to see an accordion out in public.
• United Kingdom – The moment you’ve all been waiting for, where I try to be polite about the UK entry. It’s not dreadful. The afraid of/made of couplet is probably the best bit. But while Jade Ewen puts in a good performance, it’s rather shrill, all a bit one note (despite there being lots of notes in it) and, yeah, a bit dull. (6th on Betfair.)

The Rest
The rest were neither particularly good, nor particularly bad, not dull enough to be in the third group. Here are comments on a few:

• Albania – Catchy enough, although the lyrics are pretty bland. Better than Albania’s usual standard.
• Armenia – Starts well (is this what eastern European dance music is like?) before descending into cliched “everybody move your body” fare.
• Azerbaijan – Very Europop. Catchy and not the first with a Shakira vibe, but ultimately forgettable. (But don’t take my word for it: it’s the 4th favourite on Betfair.)
• Bosnia & Herzegovina – Nice little song that repeatedly hints that it’s going to take off into something great but never quite does. (Tipped by Popbitch to give Norway a run for its money, it’s 9th on Betfair.)
• Finland – Self-proclaimed 1990s style dance pop. Which is just what the world needs more of. Does what is claims.
• France – After surprising the world with a very good entry last year, France have returned to safe territory with this ballad. Still better than many of their entrants, with a Patricia Kaas giving it a bit of Piaf.
• Iceland – Sweet and nicely performed but unremarkable. Best they don’t win anyway – could they afford to host it?
• Moldova – It’s bouncy, I guess. I admit that I was starting to flag at this point. I imagine this song (“Dance of Moldova”) will have some Moldovan dancing on the night. (You can have that prediction for free.)
• Russia – Unfortunately named singer Nastya apparently won Russia “Star Factory” competition, one of several reality TV graduates in this year’s Eurovision. It’s a plague. It’s certainly more catching than this song which demonstrates only intermittent virulence in the chorus, but not for lack of effort from Nastya.
• Slovakia – Nice enough little duet with more of the increasingly popular string backing and a dutifully include key change.
• Turkey – A typically competent entry from Turkey but I suspect this won’t achieve much. (I expect to have egg on face for saying that as it’s 3rd on Betfair and I’ve seen much more positive comments about it.)

So who’ll win? While I’ve based my comments on the videos, much of what happens on the nights (the semi-finals are on May 12th and 14th; the final is on the 16th) will depend on whether the performers do the songs justice and the spectacle of the performances, which can make a song memorable amongst a crowded field. I hope it’s not stating the obvious to say the outcome of the final will also depends on who gets through from the semis: will there be one big dance number for votes to coalesce around, or will they be made to split between lots of similar songs?

That said, Norway must be the favourite, and this is why:

The BBC has just revealed that the identity of the actor who will succeed David Tennant will be announced tomorrow evening.

They will appear in tomorrow’s episode of Doctor Who Confidential – on BBC One at 5.35pm – giving their reaction to being cast.

The full story is on the BBC News website. Tomorrow evening also sees the latest Lloyd Webber reality TV contest start on BBC One. Eurovision: Your Country Needs You is the X-Factorisation of A Song for Europe.

Update: Matt Smith is the Doctor!