Well it’s the morning after the night before – after so much build up and excitement, it was fantastic to get to the first live event!
As we’ve come to expect from Sweden, it was an extremely professional show and fantastically produced. Some of the camera movements, angles and cuts were like nothing we’ve seen at Eurovision before.
How did my predictions, hopes and the Chiswick-Brighton jury do?
Read on…!
Firstly, who actually qualified?
In the order, they were announced, it was…
How did my predictions fare? These were based on my readings of the betting, how rehearsals had been going, and feedback and comment on the various blog sites and on social media.
I got 8 out of 10 which wasn’t too bad. I had Iceland and Bosnia down as going through and Azerbaijan and Austria as not qualifying.
How did my hopes do (i.e. who I wanted to go through, irrespective of actual likelihood)?
I got 7 out of 10 here, not too bad. The ones I had wanted to go through who didn’t were Estonia, Iceland and San Marino; the ones I hadn’t picked were Croatia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In retrospect, I am happy that Croatia got through. The song and performance deserved to go through and I was disappointed with Estonia’s performance on the night. So you could say 8 out of 10 there 🙂
Finally, the joint Chiswick-Brighton jury of me and nine friends who got together for semi-final gatherings in those two aforementioned places, scored the acts as we watched. We scored independently and then I totted up the final scores. Quite remarkably, we got the most accurate result, getting 9 out of the 10 qualifiers.
The only one that was out of sync with the actual result was Iceland/The Netherlands. It was perhaps surprising The Netherlands wasn’t in our top 10, but the biggest surprise of the night for all Eurovision fans was the non-qualification of Greta SalĂłme from Iceland. Lots of upset fans on Twitter last night as you might expect! Greece also failed to qualify for the final for the first time, though while that is a surprise in some ways, given the song and performance, it was not…
On to semi-final 2 (in which the UK can vote) and more predictions tomorrow!
PS I am DELIGHTED that Czech Republic got through for first time ever – well done Gabriela, you deserved to be in the final!
Really liked Moldova too. Not sure how Armenia got through. Probably something to do with the lack of clothing.