The minute Sweden won last year, there was great excitement. Surely... surely this would mean a return for the mighty Petra Mede: the staggeringly brilliant host of the 2013 contest! Oh yes. This time, though, she's brought a friend, in the form of last year's winner: Måns Zelmerlöw (rest your 1991-style fears; he does a good job). Why dilute Petra in this way? Because it allows her a little more variety... someone to riff against... someone with whom she can share a comedy duet about how to win the Eurovision Song Contest. Yes... inevitably the best performance of 2016 is not by one of the contestants. Indeed, aware of this eventuality, very few nations seem to have put in much compositional effort: there's an awful lot of templated power-pop chasing its own tail with little reward. It's the sort of night that needs a good pair of presenters.

After 17 tracks of recycled Europulp (not EuroPulp - that would be something else entirely), things were looking decidedly down. But then it was Russia's go at the Globe. They looked at last year's winner and thought "how can we improve on that?". Their solution: to develop a PowerPoint projection you can climb up. Musically, at least, it's a bit of a raid of the Greek stationery cupboard circa 2009, but that's far from a bad thing. "Thunder and lightning / It's getting exciting" sang our Sergey... and for the first time that evening it was.

Dancing on Russia's coat-tails and going decidedly big in the hall was Spain's Barei, resplendent in a sequined basketball shirt and using the thrust stage for all it was worth. She gave us a lively little dance-floor filler with just a nip of Jess Glynne and just a lot of leg-jiggery (plus a "Baila el Chiki-Chiki" choreographed collapse). Latvia followed, bringing it down splendidly with a cut-price Morten Harket and some minimalist poop!-y house synths. He growled, energetically, into his microphone (something about wanting a Datsun, I think), while three stripes of light wobbled, responsively, below his feet. Not quite the chilled brilliance of last year's Belgian entry, but the coolest thing on offer this time around.

And then it was the Ukrainian entry. Time to bring things down in a different way: "When strangers are coming / They come to your house / They kill you all / and say / We’re not guilty ... You think you are gods / But everyone dies / Don't swallow my soul / Our souls" -- Or it could be "arseholes"; "arseholes" also fits... it's probably "arseholes".  Yes, this is a song about Stalinist oppression in 1940s Crimea, and it makes for a handy metaphor if that's what you're after. Or a moving reminiscence about a grandmother's plight, if you prefer. Either way. The song has a faint hint of Albania 2012, but without the weirdness - which is to be lamented. Speaking of laments, the mournful chorus (with its filigree light-show) is sung in Crimean Tatar - a language mutually intelligible with Turkish (as is the music). From here, the two-step rhythm track begins to take hold, and the soothsayerish Jamala gets increasingly animated (almost Bez-like at times, at least if Bez's drug of choice were mogadon), with plenty of opportunities to wail (none of which are wasted); by the time she explodes into a golden tree of light, we're entering Spain 1983 territory (musically, that is; let's not make this any more messy than it already is). We are a million miles from Jamala's failed 2010 National Final bid - "Smile"; this is not about smiling but about wailing, gnashing teeth, despairing at humanity, and maybe, just maybe, calling Russia "arseholes". There's no denying it's passionately delivered, and different from everything else on offer this year. Sometimes that's enough.

VOTING

Aside from Romania getting booted out for non-payment of debts, and Australia finding their way back in for reasons even Wittgenstein struggles to untangle, it's the voting where most interest has fallen this year. Not least because of the new way in which the results are delivered : jury votes from each country (only the 12 points delivered by mouth) then all the televotes combined into a great big pudding of points (delivered from worst to best). The result is <lights go down; tense bass loop; dramatic pause> a clichéd elimination process: "Not enough points go to... ... ...       ... ... ...United Kingdom!" etc. This is not to say that the new presentation method lacks tension; just that it is a manufactured tension; the leadership race being reduced to a couple of last minute calls and some invisible maths. It is fair to say there is some room for improvement (perhaps having the spokesperson giving two lots of 12pts?). Lazy Russian journalists latched on to the fact that Russia had won the phone poll, and took it as a reason to bemoan politically motivated juries; rationalists pointed to Australia winning the jury vote and wept; British commentators saw Georgia winning the UK jury vote and laughed, then saw Lithuania winning the UK phone vote and shrugged. All this increased scrutiny of the disparity between the two voting systems served to highlight, all the more starkly, the long-established truth that both the jury votes and the televotes are equally pretty batshit in their own contrasting little ways. It's also led to increased scrutiny of the jury operations: a Russian juror who periscoped some seemingly woeful judging got replaced as a consequence; one of the Danish jury managed to rank her acts the wrong way round, allowing the UK and Ukraine to get points from Denmark, while denying France and Russia. In previous years it's been the phone votes that were dogged with mistakes and fraud, which was, of course, why the juries were brought back into play. Yes, they get things hilariously wrong, but then they always did.