EUROVISION TIME AGAIN - THE HEATS

Well, after years of resisting, not least because for many of those years we didn't have the channels for it, we seem to have got ourselves drawn in to the almost "week-long" Eurovision experience, even though it makes us feel slightly unclean, almost as if we're betraying the virtue of the pure inner sanctum that is the Saturday night show.

But these days, it really is the only way to get to see the most dreadful of the tat that the Eurovision Song Contest has to offer (other than becoming insane enough to seek it out online, of course), because, believe it or not, Saturday's show represents the best of it after all the fun and the chaff has been weeded out.

So, now that I've been fully indoctrinated by the Beloved into enduring enjoying this annual camp-fest, it's now been extended to take up two more chunks of my life and, horror of horrors, we also got to see the new BBC3 presentation bimbette who had all the attributes of a career tellyist who really didn't give a flying fig about whatever thing it was that she'd been employed to present, but was being paid enough to pretend that she did - even if she didn't seem to be able to vocally distinguish a pianist from a penis from time to time.

We also had to sit through a dreadful montage of Eurovision wannabes and their nanosecond of being on the telly as the Grate European Public had been persuaded to perform last year's winning song in their bedrooms for a "blink and you'll miss it" chance to feature in a little floating rectangle of madness with all the other thousands of hopelessly gullible fools hoping that this was to be their shot at the Big Time… You could almost hear the internet grinding as people scrolled their iPlayers backwards and forwards in a desperate attempt to spot the three pixels that was them to share a great big Squeeeeeeee!!! with all of their vapid chums.

Along with this we got to hear the pointless drivel being spouted by the over-excitable and seldom original great mass of the Twitterati which made me sigh to the very depths of my broken soul at the sheer banality and inanity of what these folk choose to share.

Tuesday's first semi-final brought along with it an Armenian power ballad... Latvian hippies... Dire Estonian pseudo-sex romps... Swedish intensity... Icelandic la-la-lunacy... Albanian retro-hippiedom which took me right back to the sixties... Russian twin girls of the sort that always seem to turn up in my Spam folder... Azerbaijani trapeze artists in evening dresses... Ukrainian hamster wheels... A Belgian mother's boy of Pavarottian proportions... A Moldovan warrior princess... A woman in white performing with some curtain material from San Marino... A semi-naked Portuguese woman with two massive, er, drums... A lil bit of country and western from the Netherlands... Ice skating and pan pipes and (ugh!) fiddles from Montenegro… And an almost unbearable "pretty boy" type performing teenage sulks for Hungary…

Happily, after an hour and a quarter of that sort of nonsense, we didn't feel the need to hang around for the voting and turned the TV off, and whilst it is rather impressive that these poor, deranged fools do have to perform it live, our main discovery of the evening was that watching and not drinking any alcohol does tend give you a headache.

So, not knowing the result, off we popped to bed, with the prospect of another semi-final to be got through on Thursday.

This featured fewer acts than Tuesday in that there were only fifteen, not sixteen, but we hardly noticed the difference to be honest.

This time around, we kicked off with a bonkers but impressive music and dance number called "building the stage" which did manage to feature some quite astounding set design and lighting, as well as a fiddler obviously selected on his weird looks alone, and then things continued with... the acts...

Malta started us off with a scruffy little family combo doing a folky number that sounded rather more Celtic than I'd normally like, and then the rest of the evening featured an Israeli fire maiden belting out a pseudo-Bond theme which turned a bit techno... A Norwegian carpenter turned singer (don't give up the day job) which turned out to be rather sweet... Some Georgian nonsense involving a parachute and a shrieking redhead in an odd dress... Something bonkers and utterly Polish which shows how for women's rights have come (my eyes!)... A bearded transvestite from Austria who was actually rather impressive... Fetishistic but dreary weirdness from Lithuania... A Finnish boy band including one wearing a shiny silver leather suit who'll probably do quite well... Something ghastly from Ireland that involved kilts and a bloody bodhran as well as the inevitable fecking fiddle... Something oddly cheesecake-based from Belarus... An asymmetric Macedonian blonde being troubled by a freak in a monstrous onesie slash hoodie... A Swiss whistler and his merry band... A Greek trampolinist backing a dreary trio doing some exhausting and nasty Europop which will probably play well in the clubs this summer, unfortunately... A bit of a worthy, flutey big ol' Eurodirge from Slovenia... and finally a Romanian crowd-pleaser.

So, having avoided the voting once again, now it's just a question of waiting for Saturday evening, where we'll revisit the survivors, and experience the other six songs for the first time, whilst devouring our own body weight in cheese and wine, whilst filling in the customised marking sheets featuring our now utterly obscure and unique marking system.

It's not yet looking like a classic, but it might be fun...