Hold us back, this could be epoch-making.

Speculation has been mounting that the star of Herbie and, umm… hecklerspray has timed her arrival to coincide with that of former/current were-they-weren’t-they lover/pal/fanny chum Sam Ronson, who is in town to get paid to play a couple of records.

It’s called “DJing”, apparently. Ah well, at least it involves more talent than standing still and managing not to die while being photographed. For money. Which exactly what Lindsay is doing.

The conspiracy theorists don’t normally go to town on celebrity news, instead focusing on more important things like why the pyramids exist, how aviation fuel “doesn’t burn like that!!!?” or why Piers Morgan is allowed to carry on living.

This time, however, the paranoia is flying in from all angles with a plethora of conflicting reports, hearsay and general anarchy on the presses. It’s sure to be the end of the world as we know it.

It is possible people have just got a bit bored of talking about Robert Pattinson, they realised they don’t like Susan Boyle anymore and they discovered that (as we said) the Eminem/Bruno skit was indeed set up, so they have to fall back to some more generic celebrity news.

Either that or there’s been an attack of nostalgia on the part of all of those celebrity news outlets and they have collectively felt the need to report on a true classic of the gossip columns.

Why all the speculation? Well probably because there isn’t a whole lot to go on with regards to this story – Lindsay Lohan has arrived in the UK a day or two after her possibly-though-maybe-not-anymore-if-she-ever-was-to-begin-with girlfriend Sam Ronson, and is scheduled to make appearances in similar places at similar times.

The most astonishing facts from the story popped up in The Mirror though, with the paper reporting:

“While she was on the Eurostar, LiLo took pictures on her mobile phone of her with her fingers in her mouth, looking all worried.”

Truly mind-blowing stuff.

But hey, it’s not like people haven’t always followed their other halves around – we managed to alienate one whole girl from our lives by relentlessly following her for three years solid. It would have been fine, but we’re not one person, we’re an amalgamated form of writers and critics, so it’s sure to spook anyone out.

Lindsay is only human though, and not an amorphous blob of biting cynicism, so she’s more than welcome to stalk her (possible) ex. Yes, human, and – if she is a bit of a mental stalker – definitely creepy with it.

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So this is it. It’s been a while – a bit too much of a while, according to our weakened mindstate – but we’ve finally profiled all but one of the Eurovision entries this year.

That leaves us with just one to do – for some poxy little island called ‘the UK’ – before our great big Eurovision 2009 liveblog. Tomorrow evening, at 8pm, we’re going to be liveblogging the arse off the Eurovision Song Contest, either until it finishes or until we have a stress-related nosebleed. Don’t bet against the latter. Anyway, our point is this – be there.

So, finally, here is the Eurovision 2009 profile for Jade Ewen from the UK…

United Kingdom . Jade Ewen, My Time

And now to us. The UK has broken with tradition this year by not letting the public chose its Eurovision song, which is obviously a good thing because, judging by our last few entries, the British public are all medically braindead. So will My Time by Jade Ewen change our Eurovision fortunes? Hardly – just because we’re not entering a singing binman or a creepy rapper this year doesn’t mean that Europe hates us any less. What’s more, the song has been composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber so it essentially sounds like something that a middle-aged housewife from Surrey would be played to help her out of a coma or, worse still, the backing music to a tragic Britain’s Got Talent contestant’s intro tape. And isn’t a song about how much you deserve to win Eurovision bound to get on everyone else’s nerves, Jade? God, we’re screwed.

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That feeling isn’t just limited to perfume commercials, you know. The Safestyle double glazing TV adverts have been running on and off for years, and yet every time one of them is broadcast we find ourselves quivering in the foetal position trying to chew our own shoulder off afterwards because we just can’t work any of it out.

In short, the Safestyle ad is a commercial so confusing that this is the only logical conversation that could have possibly taken place at the advertising brainstorming meeting:

Safestyle executive: “OK, so the benefits of double glazing are clear to everyone – noise reduction, heat insulation, security – and we’d also like to highlight some of our financial incentives as well. Any ideas?”

Advertiser: “Yes! Why don’t we find a obnoxious, self-consciously wacky bald man who looks like he’s from Narnia and makes Barry Scott look like the world’s finest Shakespearean actor, dress him up like a Medieval time-traveller from the future and make him walk around the world’s cheapest set destroying your own products and bellowing at the viewers in a way that’s virtually guaranteed to offend all of them into never using your company for anything?”

Safestyle executive: “Well, um, that’s not really…”

Advertiser: “I saved your life, John. Remember? In the war? I dragged your injured body to safety through minefields and machine gun fire. You said you were forever indebted to me. Remember that?”

Safestyle executive: “Oh, alright then.”

Watch the gruesome Safetyle UK advert now

That’s because it’s true. The Eurovision Song Contest has got so political these days. The proof? The UK hasn’t won Eurovision for over a decade, regardless of whether we’ve entered a rubbish holiday camp cabaret act or a hamfisted reality TV show runner-up. It’s a flipping disgrace.

But Eurovision won’t be political for much longer, because Eurovision bigwigs are bringing back national juries in a bid to end the tactical voting that’s destroyed the contest’s credibility in recent years. At last! Now when the UK comes last at next year’s Eurovision we’ll know for certain that it was because our entry was genuinely awful and not because everyone’s quite scared of Vladimir Putin.

Another fact: the UK was robbed at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. No, we were. Andy Abraham’s song Even If came joint last out of 43 countries, when everyone knows that turgid rehashes of I Believe In Miracles sung by binmen with all the charisma of wet toilet paper deserve to come at least 39th.

Instead of watching Andy Abraham lift the Eurovision trophy we had to watch in disgust as Russia won – not because they entered a globally-renowned heartthrob who’s sold tens of millions of records and whose song was produced by Timbaland and featured a dance routine by a world champion figure skater, but because of tactical voting.

Oh you know. Tactical voting. It’s where all the Scandinavian countries vote for each other, all the former members of the USSR vote for Russia and nobody votes for the UK because we’ve spent the last decade humping America’s leg like a randy dog instead of concentrating more on countries like Andorra.

Tactical voting has destroyed Eurovision to the extent that Terry Wogan even threatened to quit earlier this year unless it was nipped in the bud.

And, terrified that a red-faced Baileys-stinking old Irish bloke would quit his commentary job, Eurovision has decided to do exactly that, by reintroducing national juries – the process of electing a panel of experts to judge each country’s Eurovision entry rather than letting it become a public phone-vote free-for-all. Ruurd Bierman, chairman of the Eurovision reference group, said:

“We strongly believe in televoting as a way of measuring the opinion of our millions of viewers across Europe. After the public debate about neighbour and diaspora voting, we decided to give the national juries a say in the outcome of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest.”

That’s perfect in principle – it means that next year the continent’s finest scholars, taste-makers and musicologists will be able to detail exactly why the UK is so staggeringly bad at Eurovision – but let’s think about this seriously.

If, say, Russia wanted to win Eurovision again, wouldn’t it be far easier and more cost-effective to go and personally intimidate the national juries of its neighbouring countries, rather than maintaining a vaguely menacing military threat over the entire east European/central Asian region?

But now’s not the time to be cynical. Perhaps by bringing back national juries, Eurovision can restore itself to its former glory. True, not winning Eurovision might cause Russia to lose its temper and nuke the entire continent into the boiling sea, but compared to the thrill of seeing the UK come sixth or seventh at a singing contest that nobody really cares about anyway, it’s definitely worth the risk.

Unfortunately, the incident happened in America and not in the UK where so far the most exciting thing to do for viewers is count how many times Luke mentions the £100k cheque.

We’re always told that things don’t go truly mental until the series kicks off, gets into its stride and sees housemates go quite mental. Sadly the UK version is halfway through and still as exciting as pouring vinegar over your own open wounds.

Consequently we’re switching to America for some entertainment. Quite literally we’re thanking God for turning the equally boring show into something worth watching. Fear not, we’ve got a video of it as well, after the jump.

Was that exciting or what?

Honestly, we’re going to constantly play that video whenever the UK version gets dangerously boring. Actually we may have to that right now. Rex is taking about his restaurants, Lisa’s blabbing on that she possesses gypsy powers, Darnell is inappropriately swearing and Kat is singing. Absolutely no change at all there then.

But if you were wishing for some Big Brother housemates to perish in a pit of rubble you’d be disappointed. The earthquake that measured 5.4 on the richter scale only lasted around fifteen seconds – not enough to make a Hollywood disaster movie on the events, but surely enough to make someone traumatised for life.

It wasn’t just reality show morons that were affected by God’s mighty decision to shift the earth, with stony-faced Judge Judy also feeling the true power of the space magician himself.

How Hollywood copes with all these earthquakes we don’t know, but it does make us wish that the UK had some sort of natural disasters to spice things up. Boring football matches would be made a lot more interesting if comets were hurtling towards the pitch.

Or what about making the banker from Deal Or No Deal a bit harder? It would make the contestants less thrilled, to say the least, if they knew there was the chance of picking a box with no money, instead offering a chance at death via a one-on-one gladiatorial conflict. It would certainly ramp up the pressure, that’s for certain.

God, if you are reading hecklerspray as you normally do, can you send a plague of flesh eating termites to the UK Big Brother house? Now that’ll make decent television.

(Yes, we’re quite aware that’s two stories covering one earthquake, but come on! Footage of these reactions is priceless!)

On Saturday the UK Eurovision entry Andy Abraham came joint last – along with some nondescript Germans and a Polish tooth machine who looks like she bathes in Ronseal – causing Terry Wogan to mumble furiously about political block voting and boycotts and even his own resignation if our crap songs weren’t taken as seriously as mainland Europe’s crap songs in the future.

And now Terry Wogan’s outraged warcry has been backed up by none other than Bruce Forsyth. Old men grumbling about stuff? Who’d have thought?

We wouldn’t like to be Andy Abraham at the moment. After coming joint last in Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest, Andy’s managed to become the most high profile British loser in all of Europe. And that’s saying something, given John Terry’s proven inability to stand up and kick a football at the same time.

Scoring points from just two out of 43 countries, Even If by Andy Abraham is going to go down in history as a song that’s even less successful than Scooch. Than Scooch, for christ’s sake. Watching your children get gang-raped by bears has to be less painful than that.

And that’s why the angry Eurovision backlash has begun. It started during Eurovision itself, as Terry Wogan started to mutter darkly about western Europe boycotting the contest because Eurovision was no longer a music contest while watching several former-Soviet countries give full marks to the Russian entry.

Andy Abraham had one of our best entries in years, Wogan said. It didn’t matter that it sounded like the theme tune to Supermarket Sweep, or that it was the second song to be performed out of 25 so everyone forgot about it when they voted, or that it was completely free of any memorable traits whatsoever – we should have won and because we didn’t we should pick our ball up and go home.

And now Terry Wogan has received some high-profile backing from an 80-year-old chinny dancer and the man who Kerry Katona named her child after. The Press Association reports:

Showbusiness legend Bruce Forsyth said: “I agree with him. It’s not a song contest any more, it’s political. It’s all so biased, it’s developed into a farce. I’ve stopped watching it, the last couple of years.”… Public relations guru Max Clifford commented: “Terry Wogan is spot on. It’s all about politics and block voting and nothing to do with the merits of a song. It’s like having a World Cup where the results are worked out in political terms and it’s got nothing to do with who scores the most goals.”

So what’s going to happen? Is the UK really going to retreat from Eurovision? There’ll be a bit of a catch-22 scenario if it does, because the UK pays for about 40% of Eurovision’s running costs at the moment. If the UK quits Eurovision then the lack of money will force several other smaller former Soviet countries out of the contest, too, effectively dismantling the eastern voting block. With that gone, the competition will be fairer and the UK stands a decent hope of winning. Until it decides to rejoin Eurovision, of course, because then it’ll pay for everything again and the eastern voting block will be able to afford to rejoin as well and we’re all back at square one.

Oh, it’s a tricky one. Why can’t Eurovision be fair and simple like it was in the old days, when it was won and lost depending on which crackpot fascist nationalist dictator happened to be in power at any given time? Such a simpler time.

Read more:

Wogan backed over Eurovision attack - PA

If you haven’t placed a Eurovision bet yet, then this is the time to do so. The odds are currently flying around all over the place, so get in quick. It couldn’t be simpler to do. And, as for today, we’ve save the best for last. Well, OK, maybe not the best. We’ve saved the alphabetically final for last. Yes, that’s better.

Here are the Eurovision betting odds for Andy Abraham and the UK, with help from Paddy Power…

UK (pop. 59,553,800; a country in western Europe) Andy Abraham, Even If

Remember when X Factor runner-up Andy Abraham won the Eurovision qualifier? That was a sorry day and no mistake – his song wasn’t even the best of the night, so what chance does it have of winning Eurovision? As it turns out, time has been rather kind to Even If. Now that we’ve been forced to listen to all the other Eurovision songs in the running this year, the fact that Even If isn’t a bad dance remix powerballad is actually fairly refreshing. Plus everyone likes that song I Believe In Miracles, don’t they, and this sounds identical to that. So maybe, just maybe Even If by Andy Abraham isn’t quite as bad as we made out. Still sounds like the theme-tune to a shit daytime TV gameshow, though. And let’s not kid ourselves that the fucker will even win, shall we. Current Eurovision betting odds – 50/1

Next week – Not a clue. Seriously. But if that’s too long to wait – or you feel like making more money than you know what to do with – head right over to the Paddy Power Eurovision betting odds page to see the latest, and best, betting odds.

And this year it's us.

Andy Abraham, an X Factor runner-up from 2005, won Eurovision: Your Decision on Saturday night, which means he'll be representing us at the Eurovision Song Contest in May with his song Even If. And that would be fine, except that a) everyone involved in the show obviously wanted Michelle Gayle to win, and b) Andy Abraham's song is a big sack of donkey bollocks. Honestly, not a single homosexual blowjob joke. Who do these people think we are?

Britain has a proud tradition at the Eurovision Song Contest. Admittedly it's a tradition that involves sending a bunch of clueless twonks into mainland Europe armed only with an unimaginably terrible song and then muttering about political voting when they inevitably bottom out in front of an audience of hundreds of millions, but we never said it was a good tradition.

It's almost as if we don't know what music Europeans like any more, although that can't be the case. Play a Romanian a song about schoolgirls by a rapping pikey who looks like a murderer, or some sub-Steps dance twaddle about oral sex and they'll go crazy for it, right? What do you mean, no? 

Which brings us to Saturday's Eurovision: Your Decision. Back in the day it was called A Song For Europe. But back in the day it didn't try so hard to be a bad third-generation X Factor clone that you half expected Dannii Minogue to wander on halfway through and hypnotise everyone with her impossibly shiny face. Honestly, whoever invented Eurovision: Your Decision needs to be humanly put to sleep, because it just didn't make any sense.

This is how Eurovision: Your Decision worked: six acts all sang songs in three groups of head-to-head battles, and half were immediately eliminated by the annoying man from Torchwood – except for one who was retained as a wildcard – with the remaining acts voted for by the public for an hour to find the top two, allowing voting to be briefly suspended and then resumed for 10 minutes so the public could vote for a second time and pick a winner. Simple really.

Anyway, forget the ridiculous rules – what were the songs like? As if you need to be told. They included a Girls Aloud rip-off by two nondescript women who'll be in Nuts magazine by the end of the year when they've failed at everything else, the obligatory Eurovision Motowny song performed by three girls who couldn't hit a note if you tied it to a chair and gave them knuckle dusters, a pointless ballad by a winking creep who used to be on that Joseph show, a song by the Romanian girl from the Maria show that sounded like one of those Shakira songs that doesn't do well because it's not about her tits, Even If by Andy Abraham and Woo! You Make Me by Michelle Gayle.

Everyone wanted Michelle Gayle to win. Everyone. Her song was up-tempo, catchy, fun and – most importantly – only contained the words "Woo!", "Yeah!" and "Ow!" so it was like listening to Pete from Big Brother being beaten up by a gang of football hooligans. The expert judges, knowing that Michelle Gayle's song was the best of a bad bunch, were clearly desperate for her to represent the UK at Eurovision. But the expert judges didn't get the final say.

No. The public had the final say. The light entertainment Saturday evening public – a portion of the public who cheerily clap along to baby-rape if it happened on a shiny-floored studio, Dale Winton was presenting and they had a chance of winning a mid-range car. And the public didn't want Michelle Gayle to win. It wanted Andy Abraham to win.

Oh come on, Andy Abraham. Prawny Andy the sad binman who didn't win X Factor three years ago. You remember. No? Well someone must have, because he won Eurovision: Your Decision and it really can't have been because his song was good. Because it wasn't. Even If by Andy Abraham couldn't have been more uselessly generic if it rolled off a factory production line, and the closest it'll ever come do being big in Europe is if it gets played on one of those horrible Dover to Calais Dance To France disco ferry trips. Take a look for yourself. And don't be scared of Andy Abraham's man-nipples. Yes, they're the size of a grown man's fists, but they won't hurt you…

Watch Even If by Andy Abraham again. And again. And again. And again. Can you remember how it goes? Us neither. And if you can't remember it, then imagine how a poverty-stricken Latvian goat-farmer is going to fare during a three-hour Eurovision Song Contest full of other equally terrible tunes.

Maybe, and we know this is a crazy idea here, but maybe next year the BBC should do away with Eurovision: Your Decision and initiate some sort of Eurovision: Let's Leave The Decision Up To People Who Know What They're Doing For Once. Because, honestly, we don't even think that Andy Abraham is going to beat Ireland's abusive Eurovision turkey puppet come May. He couldn't even beat Shayne Ward, for God's sake. Shayne Ward!

Read more:

Eurovision 2008 - BBC