Eurovision: Please Let It Die!

First, a fantasy conversation between Noël Coward and Andrew Lloyd-Webber:

"Ah, Mr Lloyd-Webber – I am, of course, familiar with your work. I particularly enjoyed the music to West Side Story."

"But I didn't write the music for West Side Story."

"Quite..."

Now I've got that off my chest... Seriously, isn't it time we let the Eurovision Song Contest die? And this isn't just born from sour grapes because we failed to trash Norway; it's just the whole farcical nature of the thing.

To begin with, according to my knowledge of geography (which I'll admit to being somewhat sketchy at best) Russia isn't even in Europe. So the rules are being kinda stretched a bit these days, eh?

Secondly, the guy who won last night is already a huge pop star in his country and not some random element picked from a tiresome TV talent show (no offence Jade, but it's the truth).

So when we did we start playing games with our European brethren (and Russia) with a self-imposed handicap? In the past, we've had Cliff Richard, Lulu, etc batting for our team but is it now down to some sort of national conceit that we pass over the fact that British pop music is actually quite good and decide to knobble our chances?

If we can extend this kind of thinking to sport, would we enter a football team against Germany in a cup final which was made up from enthusiastic amateurs? Or would we pick the best of the best and really go for it?

And then there's the BBC dedicating three and a half hours to the thing (add an hour if you include the documentary that ran earlier in the evening). I recommend that the Beeb's programme planners spend the evening in a DVD rental shop on a Saturday night when Eurovision is on: when someone rents Heaven's Gate as an alternative to Euroboredom, it's surely a cry for help.

It's gone past that stage when Eurovision was so bad it was actually good, so let's just cut and run...

And bring back European It's A Knock-Out instead!