A big slice of Euro cheese

Saturday night at 8pm. The answerphone will be on, the mobile off and the ra-ra skirt with Velcro fastenings hastily adjusted. I'll be at home, joining 300 million other viewers worldwide, watching the Eurovision Song Contest.

It has held a special place in my heart ever since, as a young girl, I longed for Bucks Fizz to win - they did, with a heady mix of blonde highlights and skirt ripping.

Now, of course, I watch for all sorts of reasons - the tacky costumes, the scoring rituals, the xenophobic ramblings of Terry Wogan. Yet, ironically, the contest's naffness has invested it with cool. The singing is extraordinary, though not in any nice sense.

Watching Turkey's entry in 1983, I wondered whether the band, Cetin Alps and the Short Waves, hadn't suffered a mystery seizure, only to discover that they were singing. The song, Opera, was eventually voted one of the worst Eurovision entries of all time.

The Scandinavians can always be relied upon to increase the duff quota. One forgets the number of times Norway has come away from the contest with nul points, although the impenetrability of Scandinavian languages cannot have helped them.

As one Dane, so used to defeat, succinctly put it: "When you sing in Danish, it sounds like you have a throat disease."

Singing in one's native language might, to us sophisticated Londoners, sound like a group of gerbils retching, but it does provide us with a timeless Eurovision joy - Wogan coming into his own offering translations of lyrics with a barely suppressed snigger.

Take, for example, France's 2002 entry, Il Faut Du Temps: "It takes time/ No! We really have to want it!/ Mr Gandhi is dead/ Will he be dead for long?" With a tribute like this, how could Gandhi stay away?

Of course, the costumes might put him off. Sequins, glitter, leather (worn by the Germans, natch), spangles - it's Kat Slater's underwear drawer gone berserk.

The best outfit in the contest's 47-year history surely belonged to the German Guildo Horn, dressed in a green cape and frilly cuffs as he mournfully sang Guildo hat Euch lieb. How many yards of velveteen were killed in the making of his suit is anyone's guess.