Eurovision. A marmite event.

This weekend is my favourite telly night of the year. From Saturday evening at about 8pm to almost midnight I will be glued to the screen watching out of tune singing, novelty dances and weird costumes.

I am talking, of course, about the Eurovision song contest. I love it, and I always have. I can vividly remember watching Katie Boyle doing the scoring in four different languages back in the sixties and seventies with a very ferocious perm, and watching Abba perform their winning entry 'Waterloo' at the Brighton Centre forty years ago in 1974. I loved Terry Wogan's acerbic comments on the performances and even Graham Norton comperes the thing not too badly. To me, Eurovision is an evening of unabashed, cheesy and unadulterated fun which you shouldn't take too seriously.

This year, we are having a fancy dress Eurovision Party, something I have fancied doing for years and never got round to. We invited loads of people and we've got a pretty decent turn out. Some others have genuine reasons for not being able to come along but clearly a few people found the whole idea horrifying and made vague excuses.

I have never understood why some people are so vehemently against and so sniffy about Eurovision. It's become quite fashionable to say "Oh God, Eurovision. How awful". Why? These are the same individuals who will probably quite happily sit in front of 'Britain's Got Talent' or 'X Factor' with their families on a Saturday night or even (God forbid) 'Big Brother' and will listen to bad singing, total lack of talent and patently false sob stories with great tolerance and laughter, but throw in Graham Norton, a few foreigners and call it an international event and suddenly it's beneath them. Come on guys, Eurovision is nothing more than X Factor International with a bit of parochial voting for good measure. No one expects us to win, but surely we can just have fun?

Of course I say light hearted but the rest of Europe takes this competition incredibly seriously. It's seen not as a joke but as a stepping stone to proper stardom and there are heats, knock out rounds and the contest goes on for weeks before the winning act for their country takes to the international stage. True, sometimes you can watch the singer for say, Finland, and wonder what on earth the other contenders must have been like for him to have been chosen to represent his country, but presumably the Finns liked him and it has all been done in a proper, adjudicated and serious way with public votes, press interviews and so on. Of course there was the famous year when the Greeks went through all the preamble to choose someone, then the government stepped in because they thought the Greek winner was terrible and replaced her with the biggest pop star in Greece. And he won. But that instance aside, it's a well organised, well supported and pretty democratic process (slightly ironic that Greece was the cradle of democracy and then that happens, but there you go!). Did you know more people vote in the 'X Factor' here than vote in most local elections? Scary statistic that, isn't it, and I bet Eurovision heats are like that across Europe itself.

The UK entry this year is pretty good, and for once we've gone for proper Europop and not some soppy ballad or novelty number. So I shall be cheering Molly on with her song "Children of the Revolution" this year alongside the trampoline bouncing Greek boy band who, since I can't vote for the UK, I will probably vote for instead.

My party costume is a Greek Goddess. I have just about managed to persuade The Hubby to wear a t-shirt with a Greek flag on it and I have bought him one of those fez like velvet hats the Greek ceremonial guards wear outside the parliament in Athens. There will be a prize for best cozzie, a prize for the person who can identify the most European flags and a further prize for the person who can identify all of a photo parade of previous winners. There'll be pop-py music and lots of smelly continental grub. And it'll be fun, because it's a group of friends getting together to have a laugh.

So there!