The annual Eurovision Song Contest was held in Helsinki this year, and finally took place yesterday after a week of special events, street parties, and Arcada’s hugely ambitious DINA Host City broadcasting extravaganza.

Firstly, the whole city was turned into an official party all week. There were live concerts, juggling, fire-eating and the inevitable diablo-wobblers. There was a “village” of international cuisine and artefacts and, since the weather was conveniently warm and windless, the centre was full of people looking for something else to look at, and usually finding it.

The streets were alive with pleasant surprises: May 2007

Secondly, Arcada undertook a hugely ambitious mobile television project – DINA Host City – which broadcast from all over the city (and from Rosario in Second Life) and was receivable on digital television, on the web, on mobile phones, on huge outdoor screens in Helsinki, and on huge outdoor screens in Rosario. Thirdly, Saturday night involved sitting on the sofa eating marshmallows and watching Hanna Pakarinen fail to emulate Lordi with her soft-metal ballad.

I had relatively little to do with the actual television project. I did a live interview early on in the process which was much more about training the interviewer and crew than any desperate interest in my inner life. After that i merely helped feed in material from time to time.

The material came from the parallel Semano Semano festival in Rosario, in Second Life, which I had a lot to do with. Our work was interestingly different from the television students, because they were necessarily waiting for things to happen whereas we were creating events. We worked all week and finished with a forty hour festival with an hour of hosted events every four hours. In the end I participated one way or another in eight of the ten live hours – which means I am very tired now!

Catharina and Jutta ran live events for the last five hours of Semano Semano, from an hour before the Eurovision Song Contest started until an hour or two afterwards. I dropped out to watch the contest itself on the television in the living room. I say contest, but in reality there were at least four different contests being run at the same time.

There was a contest for traditionally acceptable songs of the kind which deny that anything of note has happened within music since 1955. Germany might have won this contest with their faux-swing act. There was a contest for wacky post-modern retro-fluff. The Ark from Sweden expected to win this, possibly after beatingoff a challenge from Verka, the drag queen from the Ukraine, but in my view the French won it with something that contained more ingredients than you could possibly want and no discernible point at all. There was a disco contest in which the Greek and Turkish entries both prominently featured the word Shake and obviously worshipped at the idol of Ricky Martin.

Finally there was the contest that Finland entered: for guitar-driven rock. Hanna Pakarinen had a, partly self-composed, power ballad with added riffs – but lost to Slovenia who had a contest-straddling entry; a curious mixture of power-balladry and Baltic tradition, such in Slovenian. Actually, to be fair, she lost to a lot of people. She was seventeenth, with 53 points, (but one place ahead of The Ark).

The Slovenian song was called Molitva and was sung by Marija ŠERIFOVI?. Needless to say it was in Serbaian, which made me wonder when the contest was last won by someone singing in a language other than English. I looked it up, and the answer is 1998 when the Israeli Dana International won in Birmingham singing Diva.

I then tried to find the previous winner and got stuck with 1995′s Norwegian winner from Dublin: Nocturne by Secret Garden. Is this in English or not? I listened to it in its entirety and still didn’t know. For those of you like me who have no memory of it whatsoever, it is something like an Enya b-side. It starts and ends with a bit of melodic howling in English, Norwegian or elvish, and the middle is three minutes of instrumental fluff of a world-ambient nature.

After that I couldn’t be bothered to do anymore in-depth research, involving actually listening to the songs, so I merely noted in passing that the nineteen eighties were full of winners sung in French, German and occasionally Swedish. Indeed, Sweden won in 1984, in Luxemburg, with The Herreys‘ legendary performance of Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley.

Sadly, this is a genuine fact.