Eurovision winners - part 2

A week ago today saw our family's first virtual Eurovision party, with Chris and Sophia in Horsham, Jo in Lancaster and Steph in Canada. It was fun sharing opinions over a WhatsApp group and we'd already decided the UK entry was one of the best for years. Good to see it get some jury votes, but as ever, the European public saw fit to punish us with nil points. Goodness knows what poor Iceland had done to offend them though - it defo deserved way more.

The keen-eyed among you will wonder where part 1 is - it was actually posted a couple of years ago - you can check it out here. But because I use these posts to search for stuff, I'm gonna do the most recent ones first from 1990-2025 and the next post will do 1956-1989. So here they are:

Year	Country	Song	Performer
1990	Italy	"Insieme: 1992"	Toto Cutugno
1991	Sweden	"Fångad av en stormvind"	Carola
1992	Ireland	"Why Me?"	Linda Martin
1993	Ireland	"In Your Eyes"	Niamh Kavanagh
1994	Ireland	"Rock 'n' Roll Kids"	Paul Harrington & Charlie McGettigan
1995	Norway	"Nocturne"	Secret Garden
1996	Ireland	"The Voice"	Eimear Quinn
1997	United Kingdom	"Love Shine a Light"	Katrina and the Waves
1998	Israel	"Diva"	Dana International
1999	Sweden	"Take Me to Your Heaven"	Charlotte Nilsson
2000	Denmark	"Fly on the Wings of Love"	Olsen Brothers
2001	Estonia	"Everybody"	Tanel Padar, Dave Benton and 2XL
2002	Latvia	"I Wanna"	Marie N
2003	Turkey	"Everyway That I Can"	Sertab Erener
2004	Ukraine	"Wild Dances"	Ruslana
2005	Greece	"My Number One"	Helena Paparizou
2006	Finland	"Hard Rock Hallelujah"	Lordi
2007	Serbia	"Molitva"	Marija Šerifović
2008	Russia	"Believe"	Dima Bilan
2009	Norway	"Fairytale"	Alexander Rybak
2010	Germany	"Satellite"	Lena
2011	Azerbaijan	"Running Scared"	Ell and Nikki
2012	Sweden	"Euphoria"	Loreen
2013	Denmark	"Only Teardrops"	Emmelie de Forest
2014	Austria	"Rise Like a Phoenix"	Conchita Wurst
2015	Sweden	"Heroes"	Måns Zelmerlöw
2016	Ukraine	"1944"	Jamala
2017	Portugal	"Amar pelos dois"	Salvador Sobral
2018	Israel	"Toy"	Netta
2019	Netherlands	"Arcade"	Duncan Laurence
2020	Contest cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic
2021	Italy	"Zitti e buoni"	Måneskin
2022	Ukraine	"Stefania"	Kalush Orchestra
2023	Sweden	"Tattoo"	Loreen
2024	Switzerland	"The Code"	Nemo
2025	Austria	"Wasted Love"	JJ

A few fun facts and figures:
Relatively few winners of the Eurovision Song Contest have gone on to achieve major success in the music industry. The most notable winners who have gone on to become international stars are ABBA, who won the contest for Sweden in 1974 with their song "Waterloo", and Céline Dion, who won for Switzerland in 1988 with the song "Ne partez pas sans moi". More recently, Duncan Laurence, who won for the Netherlands in 2019 with "Arcade", experienced worldwide streaming success with the song as a sleeper hit throughout 2020 and 2021, with the song becoming the most streamed Eurovision song on Spotify. While Måneskin, winners for Italy in 2021 with "Zitti e buoni", subsequently achieved worldwide popularity in the months following their victory.

Changes to the voting system, including a steady growth in the number of countries participating and voting, means that the points earned are not comparable across the decades. "Amar pelos dois" by Salvador Sobral holds the record of the highest number of points in the contest's history, earning 758 points in 2017. "Fairytale" by Alexander Rybak holds the largest margin of victory in absolute points, a 169-point cushion over second place in 2009. "Non ho l'età" by Gigliola Cinquetti holds the record for largest victory by percentage, scoring almost three times as many as second place (49 points compared with 17 by the runner-up) in the 1964 contest. The lowest winning score is the 18 points (of the 160 total votes cast by 16 countries) scored by each of the four winning countries in 1969.

Under the voting system used from 1975 until 2015, in which each country gives maximum points to its first place choice, "Euphoria" by Loreen won the 2012 contest with the most ever first place votes earned, receiving first place votes from 18 of 41 countries (excluding themselves). The 1976 winner, "Save Your Kisses for Me" by Brotherhood of Man, holds the record of the highest average score per participating country, with an average of 9.65 points received per country. The 2011 winner, "Running Scared" by Ell and Nikki, holds the lowest average score for a winning song under that system, receiving 5.14 points per country.

My Cover Designers 2 – Icy Sedgwick

As luck would have it, when one door closed, another one opened, in the form of the incredibly talented Icy – a lovely lady from the 10K Angels group. Unfortunately, I was extremely prolific during the Icy years, and rarely gave her enough notice, however she always came through with something fabulous.

The first cover was a prequel to the Hengist series, which I’d always envisioned writing at some point, and she created this truly unique cover using a photo I took of a yule log and matching with the concept of the parchment background and single object foreground. Senna’s story captured people’s imagination, and several readers wanted to know more of what happened before the start, so Nature’s Tribe ended up being 4-books instead of the three I’d imagined.
Ultimately, Hengist expanded into a 13-book saga, with a third series. This culminated in the very 1st book I wrote featuring Archer and Rory as adults. Icy pulled out all the stops, designing some breath-taking covers for the Colour of Light series, undoubtedly my favourite ones ever.

Interspersed with these two were the YA books I wrote many years before Hengist, and the Bryant Rockwell covers are cleverly done with lots of symbolism in the colour and background to the roses.

Next I collected together a bunch of my very first short stories, weaving a narrative around them featuring and extremely sassy 30-something Lexie. These were way more adult – my version of 50 Shades of Gray, so I published them under my pseudonym, Ro Green. Also as Ro, I pubbed 3 juke-box Musical books, based on stories suggested by some of my favourite bands, Journey and City Boy.

The multi-talented Icy has many more strings to her bow (including a fabulous podcast), and I thoroughly recommend you check out her books here.

My Cover Designers 1 – Anthony and Rebecca

In my 16-year publishing journey, I’ve been privileged to work with some phenomenally talented people, and it’s time to give credit where credit’s due to the handful of artists who have paired my scribings with gorgeous front covers. And that’s not all – Anthony Askew, a friend of my son’s, designed my very own white horse – Blaise, used as a trademark symbol in all the Hengist books.

Back in 2009 when I looked into getting my first book published, I came across an outfit called AuthorHouse, and drove down to Milton Keynes for a presentation, which resulted in my signing up for a publishing package costing a humungous £675.
Not my finest hour – suffice to say I learnt a very expensive lesson.
Only good thing to come out of the publication of Subterfuge on 22 May 2009 was the cover. They took my mockup and made it look amazing.

Anthony Askew

The following year, I discovered I could create books with Lulu at no cost, and I’d taken some photos I wanted to use for the covers of the first 3 hengist books, so I got Anthony to turn them into covers. Unfortunately, I had little idea of the young adult market, and my daughter reckoned they looked more like the covers on text books. She was so right.

But I did have fun getting a lad in my tutor group to come in and pose as Reagan at my kitchen table with a bunch of witchy artefacts.
Turns out he was a proper drama brat (son of an actor) and he and Steph ended up in the school production of Dracula Spectacular.

For the book tour of Archer and Rory, Anthony also created these fabulous posters (above), the third one of which resulted in the second set of Hengist book covers (below).

And he also created the most amazing book trailer for Archer.
But then he set off on his travels so I needed to find someone new.

Rebecca Stirling

One of my author buddies put me in touch with the amazing Rebecca, and she created fabulous covers for my 1st two standalones as Ro Green, followed by the re-release of Subterfuge as Fox Among Wolves, which turned into a trilogy – due to reader demand!!!

Then she came up with a fabulous concept to re-brand the Hengist stories, which turned into 5-book series.

And she also created the most amazing book trailer for New Kid in Town - the Bryant Rockwell first book. You'll need to unmute it to hear the soundtrack.
Oh, and did I mention she's also a brilliant author? Writing beautifully-crafted fantasy, (mostly shifters) as Keri Armstrong. Check out her books here.
Unfortunately, as often happens with us creative types, Rebecca took on too much, so she had to give up the cover designs, but I still count her among my friends - she's the one who came up with my nickname JRo!

Thankfully, another fabulous female stepped in to fill the breech. More next week.

My Audiobook Adventures

This episode started a decade ago when I first looked into getting an audiobook for Archer. I listened to half a dozen different narrators, but none the voices were quite right. I even got a brilliant demo from a fabulous actor/director I used to work with at Marconi, but it was not to be.

Back in January this year, I got a message from a chap offering a sample of him and a talented female. They were very good but, yet again, the voices weren’t quite right.

Imagine my surprise when I was invited to take part in a beta trial of Amazon’s new “Virtual Voice” initiative. Having been very impressed with the narrators on Office 365’s Word program, I was more than prepared to give it a go.

Three weeks later, I’m nearly finished the second run through of Time and Time Again, and let me tell you, it’s been an adventure.

To be continued very soon ...

My Instagram Adventures

This began back in January, when my fabulous daughter-in-law, Sophia, gave me a whirlwind introduction to the platform, transforming my unused account with a couple of posts and reels, and showing me a handful of tricks. In a little over two weeks, I had 8 posts, a couple of reels and a couple of dozen followers – pretty much all of whom I knew. Then the fun stuff started. My first scammer pretended to be some kind of spiritual guru, but turned out to be a teenage boy who basically just wanted money. For goodness sake. If he'd just approached me honestly and offered the sort of promotional services he reckoned he could provide, I'd have snapped his hand off. But nothing angers me more than scammers, because as a self published author, I've been targeted by these low-lives my entire writing career, over a decade.

On Sophia’s advice, I trawled through dozens of authors websites looking at the type of content they provided, and picked up a few tips along the way. Most of February was spent creating book trailers for each of the six books in my latest series, a genre mash up of time travel and dungeons and Dragons, set in a UK version of The Big Bang theory, with several nerdy 30 somethings.
The first Time Doctors book, Time and Time Again, takes us on a journey back to the early 2020s reminding of some of the miseries in surviving a global plague. Lest we forget.

Because this is yet another brand new genre for me, I'm right back to scratch in terms of marketing, despite selling thousands in each of my mediaeval, magical and military series. And several hundreds more in my young adult and coming of age series. I'm not even going to talk about my very own 50 Shades series because basically I never promoted that one too much because it didn't sit so well with the type of books I like to read.

Hence the foray into an entirely new type of marketing with all the frustrations and heartache of a (massively) steep learning curve. One of the more eye-catching tools for hooking in potential readers is the book trope graphic, so this was my next project. Apparently, they really work, because all of a sudden I’m getting half a dozen messages every day from “influencers.”

The first one I engaged with happily took my money (all $74 of it) to post a review which suddenly had 12.7k likes in a matter of hours, then not a single one since. She even had the brass neck to ask for a tip!
All's well that end's well - with Paypal's help, I got a full refund.

Time Doctors #6 - D & D Scenario

Lizzie's turn at DM results in five different scenes, each based on a previous scenario. However, she has scant idea of running a DND session.

Time Doctors #5 - D & D Scenario

Norseland

Ben dreaded his turn at DM, having seen how well the others did. But his passion for all things Marvel and particularly the Norse mythology aspects meant he didn't do a half-bad job of creating a scenario where his housemates could let loose with their inner heroes.