In the beginning, I expect to laugh – meanly. To hear two hours of soggy funk and bad ballads, to watch, cruelly snide, the parade of garish costumes and to feel superior to the broken, hammered English stuttered by a stream of poor, half crazy, spotlight seeking Eurogoofs. I shudder to find that it’s a three-disc extravaganza package. More that eight hours of Eurovision, it tells me. I swear at it and put the first semi-finals on.

First up, it’s Montenegro, where I think the kickass casino scenes from Casino Royale were shot, and their submission Just Get Out Of My Life by Andrea Demirović, who turns out to be a magnificent woman but whose terse little hip stabs puncture and deflate the enthusiasm of a thumping pop-dance backing track, which makes my rear speakers bobble happily along.

The Czechs do nothing to curb my derision. The lead looks like a Vaudeville bad guy, with a pencil-thin moustache and filthy, greased back hair; he’s wearing a tangerine coloured spandex superhero suit, complete with cape. I’m sure the SG on his chest stands for Super Gypsy. He raps and I laugh. He’s trying to do the English, I’m pretty sure, and it’s not happening for him. The chorus comes with a sudden change of tempo and meter. “I make you feel like gypsy!” the horrifying man suddenly shouts.

Belgium do a glossy, brassy rockabilly number; a Belarusian man with gorgeous, luscious blonde hair, all in white, wails with a sound like the wholesome rock of Evanescence or Creed, and Sweden swan out a forty year old woman who surprises me with a familiar-sounding dance/opera crossover that I find myself humming along to. Armenia has a song that could almost pass as respectable.

The stage is fantastic. Every surface is a blinding, full-colour screen, the whole giant back as well as both sides of the stage, even the thousand square-metre floors our heroes grace. Most countries take advantage of it, too: the light and video programming is grandiose and spectacular. All the production seems really expensive, actually; from the picture perfect hairstyles to the backing tracks, from the crystal clear high def to the short animated introduction each act gets on the DVD. There have got to be twenty thousand people in the audience. I start to realise how big a deal Eurovision is for Europe. I wonder how much and in what ways it might reflect the European political scene.

The second disc is the second semi-final. Norway’s entry is boppy enough and simple enough that I sing along to most of the chorus without ever having heard the song before. The guy from Greece is an Adonis, loose white shirt open over a broad, strong chest slick with oil; his jaw is bold and square; his teeth are bold and square and they’re so bright they leave little white trails behind them on the TV screen.

It’s been five hours now and my mouth is dry. I decide to break for lunch but instead I Google Eurovision and check out its official page, for research. It turns out I’m missing half the point of the whole event – each country’s presence at Eurovision comprises not just their act but their voting, too. Throughout the competition, one in ten of the hundred million strong TV audience phones in to vote. Points are fed into an incomprehensibly elaborate system and ejected out as ranks, from one to thirty-six. I become more convinced that the politics involved in must be staggering and intricate, although I never do have any sensible insights at all about what a country’s votes might mean.

In with disc three. Armenia are really doing it for me. They have interesting rhythms and great percussion. They’d better win. Most of the backing singers and dancers from most of the countries are inhumanly beautiful and nearly naked, which I like. I’m afraid that Sweden are going to be tough competition, even though the woman singing is two hundred years old. Albania takes the stage and the four-piece look like, variously, Little Bo Peep, the lovechild of Gumby and C3P0, and two Marcel Marceaus, and with a jolt of shame I realise that the very gaudiness I’d always ridiculed is actually a kind of self-effacement that lets Europe laugh at itself, something we like to consider a peculiarly Australian trait, and something that’s probably not that easy to do in a continent with about fifty countries.

Then Norway win and I scream profanities at the baby-faced pretty boy grinning and blowing kisses into the camera. I swear at him. He was nowhere near as good as Armenia and I’m certain now that petty politics have snatched the victory from the best act. And this means next year’s Eurovision will be in Oslo. Oslo. What the fuck is in Oslo?

So I go online and start checking out past winners and then other past performances, and reading the profiles of the acts and wondering if I can shuffle around my trip to Holland next year to coincide with Eurovision. I rub my bleary eyes and stiff neck and find that it’s well past dark and I’ve forgotten to have lunch, and dinner.