Final votes from
have been sent to both hosts, and...
damn that was hard! I think I just spent well in excess of an hour trying to rank my shortlist.
On the whole, I think this is once again a new record of my favourite ever WV final, at least in terms of overall top 10 quality. It's just had the perfect storm of things improving it, really. No one semi was mind-blowingly spectacular, but all three were safely above average; the long participant list for the edition meant that not only was the average quality higher than usual, but there were more good songs making up that average; and I had, quite importantly, brilliant luck in terms of my favourites going through.
Despite the larger semis making qualification much harder this edition, so many of my favourites made it to the finals. Looking at my top 5 from each semi, 11/15 managed to qualify; more impressively, that included 10 of my top 12, and 8 of my top 9. All of that made voting in the finals very,
very difficult; I've had to blank several songs that would usually manage a 5 or 6 from me, and even the songs that got points mostly make me feel like I haven't given them enough. Apologies to those of you with good songs that really deserved more! Nonetheless, my 12 and 10 were quite clear despite all the chaos, so that at least helped a little.
Best of luck to everyone in the finals, especially the many of you with fantastic songs