The resident guest critic will today feature for the first time on ‘Messaged from the Outhouse’. C from D near M is an avid reader of this blog and wanted to share his views on that most important of TV dates in the European calendar.

Take it away, C:

“I just watched 3 hours and 16 minutes of Eurovision song contest 2008 in Belgrade (no, the contest took place there, I sat on my sofa in D and used the BBC iplayer). My only excuse is that it has been pouring down with rain all day and that I did all my gardening yesterday. So there.

I cannot begin to tell you how glad I am not to have gone to any Eurovision house party. Being quite partial to the Germans, I would have had to kill myself. Germany’s “No Angels” were worse than bad: their song (the title of which I cannot remember) was lame, the costumes were utterly crap and tasteless (even compared to the tiny glitzy Swedish, Ukrainian, Greece and Armenian numbers), and one of the four women sang constantly out of tune! They should have done the honest thing and give their miserly 14 points to the UK, who deserved better but ended up with the same result. Germany, UK and Poland (blond bombshell with crap song, good enough voice but horsy teeth) came last, although Andy Abraham’s song was quite funky and well performed (with crap lyrics).

Best voice of the show (and that’s what Eurovision is still about in my humble opinion): Boaz Mauda from Israel (The Fire In Your Eyes). He’s got an amazingly clear and beautiful voice of a mature women inside a short male muscular teenage body. Maybe he would have won if he had shaved his armpits, if he and his pretty boys-only back up singers had all taken their shirts off during the song and if they did not come from Israel (currently not very popular in international politics, is it). If they’d done all this, I bet they would have got the millions of German gay votes instead of the Russian guy.

P.S.: Just one question to all of you out there: Was I the only one thinking that when the Swedish singer came on they finally allowed aliens at the Eurovision song contest. Terry Wogan (commenting for the BBC, as usual, although maybe for the last time) uttered something along the lines of “a bit terrifying” but didn’t elaborate. I think he meant the eyes, too.”