By Maja Gojkovic

Last night was the first round of the Eurovision Song Contest; the first semi final. Representatives from all nineteen countries presented their songs all hoping to make it to the next round and represent their countries. Serbia pulled out all the stops for the show and really impressed the audience by producing an amazing set and even involving Serbian performers and celebrities to kick off the voting.

The theme of the show, presented by Jovana Janković and Željko Joksimović, was “City”, and the theme of the Second Semi-Final will be “Water”.

After all songs had been presented, televoting started in all the participating countries as well as in Spain and Germany, who are already qualified for the Final, but were drawn to vote in the First Semi-Final, while the other directly qualified finalists - France, The United Kingdom and Serbia - get to vote in the Second Semi-Final. Nine of the qualifying countries were decided by televoting.

The countries that qualified were Greece, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Finland, Russia, Israel, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Poland and Norway.

As bookies predicted Russia have a good chance of wining. I personally agree as the song is a beautiful ballad and definitely has a Eurovision song contest feel to it. Russia may have to watch out as Greece in my opinion have a tremendous chance of winning as the song is catchy, dance like and definitely something that could be a winning number. Although performances from Russia, Greece were catchy and definitely deserved to go through to the second round of the competition others were not so lucky. Countries such as Ireland, Belgium and Estonia will have to try harder next year as this year performances were nail bitingly awful. The first semi final seemed to be influenced by a pantomime child like feel as Ireland were represented by Dustin the turkey with a song Iralnde Douze Pointe was hilariously bad which in my opinion was a shame considering Ireland’s amazing success in the competition since it first started. Belgium were represented by Ishtar with a song called O Julissi, also a poor performance in my opinion. Estonia also added to the pantomime feel during the competition as the performance looked like three middle aged umpa lumpa childrens entertainers. They were represented by Kreisiraadio with a song Leto Svet.

All in all I think the first semi final of the competition got off to a good start. If you’re a Eurovision song lover like me then if you watched yesterday’s first round it definitely wet the appetite of us lovers and definitely got the ball rolling for the competition. Out of the qualifiers from the first round my money is definitely on Russia, Greece and Israel.

If you want to watch the second round of the semi finals you can watch the show live on www.eurovision.tv. The second round of the semi finals will be on Thursday 22^nd May. The countries participating will be Iceland, Sweden, Turkey, Lithuania, Albania, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Belarus, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Georgia, Hungry, Malta, Cyprus, FYP Macedonia and Portugal.

Tags: Belgrade, dustin the turkey, Eurovision Song Contest 2008, First semi final qualifiers

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 2:33 pm and is filed under Features, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.