Another Eurovision Song Contest site

Let's start by acknowledging a few things regarding this Swiss entry.

They came ninth in both televote and jury score, yet did not reach the final.

Highest score for a non qualifier this year: 108 points. In the last ten years, only Poland 2019 (120pts) and Croatia 2021 (110pts) were higher.

The score achieved in her semi final was higher than that of the nine finalist countries I have reviewed so far.

Before the song contest, I did not believe in this song. It's a fine song, but I could not see it qualifying. I was right about that, but in watching this performance, I wish I wasn't.

The Swiss entry performance is awesome! The entire package from start to end is a never ending collection of surprises. I love the rope reference as if she is tethered to Alice, and she struggled against the rope all the way through the song. She even walked on the rope like a tightrope at one stage. I love the dancers being held back attached to red ropes and then they are captured in the red spiderweb contraption. They were not intrusive by any stretch and blended in with Veronica's performance. It is all cleverly presented, everything fit in to the parcel and nothing was redundant or strange. They also kept the palette of the performance limited with black and white to highlight the stranglehold of the song in red.

I caught the completion of the Serbian song contest and these people were crying their eyes out. The poor lead singer was not wearing proper mascara and he looked like a young Alice Cooper.

It is a song that presents delicious agony and it starts with a quiet whisper of painful, haunting lyrics. It escalates to a normal tempo before an explosion of a million wounds. It continues this way to the conclusion and ends with a exhausted grunt.

It is presented in a way where the atmosphere of darkness begins as if he is shackled and unable to continue. There are really interesting lighting changes as the song continues to a black and blue theme as he starts to free himself and turns into a landscape of red to go with his angry conclusion.

This man is ridiculous. How is he real? Not only is he a beautiful man, he seems too kind, sweet and pleasant, he doesn't seem real. I think a lot of people fell in love with him this year. Except the televoters did not vote which is just so unfair. Bella is one of this year's most beautiful songs of this year's contest and Aidan promoted it everywhere. He came to Melbourne damn it - we all should have given him more points. And in this way, I feel we let him down. He deserved better.

The Estonian entry brought back the three of the four ladies who represented Switzerland in 2005. The Vanilla Ninja ladies have mellowed, and they still like to rock out, but in a much quieter way.

In case you have no heard, a liberal politician Sarah Henderson (that idiot on the right of the picture) asked SBS Australia why there were no votes given to Israel in the jury and televotes and if SBS had rigged the votes.

There are many issues I have with this. The biggest one is in her former life, Sarah was a respected journalist and presenter. So I guess she would be able to do research before appearing like a buffoon to accuse the national broadcaster of corruption.

I didn't expect much from this Cypriot song. I couldn't figure out what they would do to bring the joy of the film clip to the stage of Eurovision. I thought it was also on the cusp of non qualifying, and somehow they pulled that off (lets not go there). The answer was a big table and somewhat decent dancers.

The dancing on the table was inspired. It fits perfectly with the party theme of the song. The issue is once you are there you are restricted to where you can go. She did get off it in the end. Antigoni did her part dancing and singing and looking appropriately happy/seductive/sexy as the mood called at the time. The outfit was a choice, but it suited the song, and backing ladies had variations of the same thing, but varied so they weren't matching completely. There was a heap of choreography both on and off the table. The dancers were up, down, under and all round dancing their hearts out. They looked very identical in the face and very different from Antigoni which made her stand out.

I was worried about this after seeing it in the national final. They looked nervous and uncomfortable on stage and it made me ill at ease. This was not that at all. It was never going to qualify, but they presented their entry in classical way that they should be proud of. I must say that they could have read me the newspaper in Portuguese and I think I would like that too.

They did a clever thing beginning on the catwalk and for the majority of the song they stayed there. They used the stage to their advantage and made the performance feel more personalised especially when the camera was walking through them and they sang down the camera. There was a relaxed feel and the men were relaxed onstage in garment and in attitude. They moved around without being captured because of clever camerawork and diversions, and the entire performance was seamless. The girl on fiddle was a highlight even though she was pretending.