Eurovision: Fifth is brilliant, apparently

Not outside of by-election disasters has coming in a lowly fifth been met with such applause and delight. Fifth place in Eurovision? That's brilliant, that is:

"Jade performed brilliantly, as I knew she would. I am delighted with her fifth place finish. After so many years of disappointing results the UK can finally hold its head up high," said [Lloyd-Webber]

Hang on a moment. Fifth? Not disappointing? Maybe I missed something back when the heats were taking place to pick a singer to do the song, but I don't quite recall the aim being "to at least be in the top ten somewhere" or that "we're choosing a singer who can ensure that Britain would at least make it on to the podium if two other entrants scored more points but got disqualified." Were we really all rooting to be fifth-best?

Shouldn't the response be "well, we had a crack" or "it's the taking part that counts"? Given that the build-up kept stressing how, with Milord Phantom on the case, this represented the very peak of our competitive-musical fitness, isn't fifth actually pretty crap? At least if Scooch crash and burn, you can shrug and say "well, it was Scooch, what do you expect?". But wasn't this meant to be our dream team, our Manchester United, our Eggheads, our Botham's Ashes first XI? And we still came in fifth.

Mind you, at least we weren't robbed like Turkey were. Theirs was actually good.