Norway wins Eurovision

Norway won this year’s Eurovision with a song called Fairytale that was written and sung by 23-year-old Alexander Rybak. Alexander also played the violin on the song.

The Norwegian song got 387 points – the most points ever for a song in the history of Eurovision.

In recent years, many countries have voted for neighbouring countries – regardless of how good the countries’ songs were! This became known as ‘block voting’ and meant that average songs did well, while some good songs got very few points.

To put a stop to block voting, the contest used a new voting system this year. In this new system, half a country’s points came from a phone vote and the other half from an unbiased group of musical experts. This meant that the good songs got more points this year.

The UK’s song came in fifth place. This was a great improvement on 2008 when the UK came last!

In recent years the UK has not taken Eurovision seriously and they have sent some bad singers. This year the UK decided to try their best to find a good singer and it seems their efforts paid off.

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