akoe

Current Mood: anxious

As more reports start to trickle back from Kyiv, it appears that Ukraine's NTU is not as advanced in its preparations as Turkey's TRT were last year. While the stage is ready for today's first performance rehersals, the work on the outside of the venue is still for from complete. Two other pieces of news that aren't encouraging is that early arrivals found that their accreditation badges wern't ready. Not only were they not ready, but there was no checking done before issuing the badges, which were made up Blue Peter style in front of the delegates. People who were meant to be P2's (no access to the Press Centre) got an instant upgrade to P1.

Slightly more distressing from my point of view, is that the PCs in the Press Centre are apparently running on Linux rather than Windows. This could cause all manner of fun and games, and as someone who nearly walked out of a job because they used Lotus Notes rather than the far superior Microsoft Office, it is really going to test my patience. "Hissy Fit alert!"

The delegate packages come wityh some nice notepaper and there's a CD with information on the background to the stage, but with the Press Centre not open until tomorrow, no one knows what other surprises lay in stores for the delegates and press pack.

Svante Stockselius, who basically runs the show these days is apparently floating around, and is being generally positive about how Ukrainian television have gotten their acts together after all the early delays, but tomorrow is going to be the big day, when the first of the rehersals start.

Rather than 13 countries rehearsing on Thursday, it will only be 12 as Israel has moved their first rehjearsal back to Friday, to allow their singer Shiri Maymon an extra day in Israel for their national day. A similar arrangement was made for tATu in Riga. However with 13 rehearsals on Friday and 14 on Monday, there are going to be some VERY long days ahead. 

Those of you who saw the Irish entry being performed on last Friday's "Late Late Show" will probably have been mystified as to what exactly were people thinking when they put that performance together. I have to say that if you are going to spend weeks (as they apparently have) re-doing the performance, it should have been an AWFUL lot better than that. It's hard to make a full list of all the faults, but whoever was responsible for they "styling" or the "choreography" (and I put both words in quotations for a reason) should probably be considering a career change.  

My inbox and messageboards all over the internet lit up with sarcasm and abuse, and its hard to blame people. The one thing I hoped would happen this year, with a Eurovision fan writing the song, was that we'd have someone who knew what was needed to achieve a good result in the contest, but at this stage I'm close to giving up hope.

The good news is that the arrangement we saw on the "Late Late Show" is apparently now history, and we'll hopefully only see it again when we have those compilations opf awful TV moments, like Boyzone's first "Late Late Show" appearance. However I can't help thinking that it would have been far better had Donna & Joe spent their time visiting other countries trying to drum up support rather than wasting so much time and effort on rehearsing a routine, which we'll never see again.

Don't forget, to make some comments, as it's always good to have other opinionms.