Polina Gagarina – A Million Voices

“The first ever non-winner to score over 300 points.”

Tim: We’ve covered the well-deserved winner of Saturday previously, but for a while on Twitter it seemed like every gay in Britain was taking to the bottle, realising they may have to go to Russia next year because of this second-placer.

Tom: Worth noting: on televotes only, Italy would have won — while the UK would have given 12 to Lithuania.

Tim: ​Whilst receiving…ah, just two points in total. Brilliant.

Tim: Russia’s an odd one – it has a fairly terrible human rights record, and has one of the least accepting viewpoints of homosexuality in the developed world. For some reason, though, they seem to believe that as long as they send an inspirational enough track to Eurovision such as this, Shine or What If, people might forget that for one night.

Tom: Which, apparently, it does. Because that is a decent song.

Tim: And, I suppose, it almost worked, with the first ever non-winner to score over 300 points. Didn’t stop them in the stadium, mind – cheers for the song, but booing aplenty every time the got 12 points, so much so that Polina had to be comforted by Conchita.

Tom: And there were a heck of a lot of rainbow flags in the audience during that song.

Tim: Aaanyway, all that aside, it’s a fairly good song? Very much one of the least-dreary ballads the night saw, certainly —

Tom: Although that’s not a high bar to clear.

Tim: True, but then it also benefited from being near-last in the running order and a camera that focusses almost entirely on her face or her being circled in some sort of halo – the rest of the people up there get barely fifteen seconds between them, so she’s got a perfect connection with the audience and transmit said inspirational track across. Perfect Eurovision ballad performance, really.