at the end of the universe

I spent Saturday evening watching television, right from the excellent tea-time frolics of Doctor Who all the way through to the alien adventures of Eurovision.

One of the shows was set in a kind of space station at the end of the universe. It resembled a late 20th Century dance club. The other show moved it on into something a little more 21st Century.

In the case of Doctor Who, there were plenty of references to other space and sci-fi series in the script as well as self references to old-school Doctor Who. Even a retro control room.

Pleasingly, the characters had a kind of Amanda Palmer meets Danger Ensemble look about them. Not surprising with Neil Gaiman as the writer of the episode.

Gaiman took the Doctor to a Neverwhere outside of the Universe. The Doctor even commented that it was somewhere he'd never been, which is fairly unusual nowadays.

It gave a chance for the plot to move up a level, presumably breaking through a few sealed doors along the way. Once a new piece of fundamental Who-history gets written there is no turning back because the fan-base will have it recorded for all time.

So the Star Whale type construct of riding on a bubble on the edge of the Universe permitted the humanisation of a slightly delirious TARDIS. She (The TARDIS, excellently played by Suranne Jones) then had to rapidly make up for 'lost time' whilst hurling some great one-liners into the script. She simultaneously channeled Queenie from Blackadder whilst stating "Biting's like kissing only with a winner."

And we got a good backstory about the theft by the TARDIS of the Doctor "Back in the Day". I'm a great believer in Time stopping everything happening at once, so it's probably fortunate that most of this happened outside of the main Universe.

That way we didn't all suffer from a catastrophe that would create tears before bedtime. Although, it has to be said that the end of the episode created a tear-jerking morph of TARDIS back to being the soul of the machine.

The tears in the following programme were somewhat different as we watched the transition of Europop to европоп.

Yes, the Russian bloc have it.

My own more trippy tastes were towards Moldova's Zdob şi Zdub or even the Irish Jedward entry, both of which featured Pop, strange headgear and whirly lights. Instead, after hours of sonics and two many Screwdrivers, we had a largely forgettable win from that epicentre of pop culture Azerbaijan. At least they dressed up.

I decided to clear my mind of all of this today and took out on my bicycle, finding myself in a Forest by a River. There was a Pond as well.

I may need help.

nul points and then a curry

Another hectic day of meetings, both face to face and virtual, including one where a few of us quipped that it was a little like the Eurovision Song Contest as we linked the various sites together by video.

Instead of traditional videoconferencing suite we were using a coin sized camera clipped to the end of a pencil, which worked surprisingly well.

Admittedly the audio was on a separate phone circuit, but somehow everything seemed to work and we were all relatively composed up to the point where the people in the Dutch office started reading out scores.

Luckily our line was on mute at the time.

Tonight its pub and curry.

post eurovision cooldown

Well, like many others, we are cooling down after the excitement of the Eurovision contest yesterday evening during which we spent a couple of hours making mild bets and critiquing this anachronistic European television.

As Brits, we've had plenty of years of Irish-voiced commentary to absorb and although Graham Norton rang the changes, the jibes were similar to his predecessor.

There is no clear criteria for selecting the winning entry. It doesn't seem to be song, musicianship, performance or any of the more obvious reasons and even the political bloc-voting of the 42 counties was somewhat less-predictable. I suppose it is just a question of making sure that bookies' favourite gets sufficient votes to ensure a return.

The Norwegian winners had several of the right ticks. It seems that violins were important and they did this well. I know the lead singer Alex Rybok was originally from Minsk, Belarus, but hey, it's within a days flight of Norway.

The British entry hovered around the fifth position, somewhat upstaged by the surrounding entries which had glowing nuclear reactors on stage in one case and hordes of woodland faerie nymphs in another.

Our singer and Lordly pianist combo was a trifle staid by comparison, with no sudden wardrobe changes although singer Jade did get a violinist's elbow in her eye.
The Germans tried adding Dita von Teese, who is no stranger to wardrobe malfunction but despite their most spectacular use of glitter, were unable to get any half decent score.

I suppose I quite enjoyed the Iceland, Azerbaijan and Turkish entries, more because they typified Europop, although try as I might, the fairyland winner just didn't appear on my shortlist.

And it seems I wasn't alone, judging from the robust twittering occurring during the event, on a separate couple of #channels created just for the purpose.

eurovision results latest twitter with added pino grigio

We've decided to squanch around the telly this evening with more wine than is sensible and watch the Eurovision contest.

As a continued way to fund rashbre central, we have bet the bank on the complete results in the order shown, using the customary combination of statistics, artistic merit, geopolitical block vote and live twittering via #eurovision #twumpet and @ewanspence.

Yeah.

And the Cirque du Soleil are rather fine.

Graham - leave some gaps.

Update: Of course the table was merely the rashbre central computerised predictions. And there was no fiddling the winner.