I am not a great fan of the Eurovision Song Contest... never have been.

In fact I studiously avoided watching it on TV for many years. That is until a good friend told me about Terry Wogan. He was an Irish-born entertainer who compéred the show on BBC TV and who basically took the piss out of the whole idiot-fest. A soft target maybe, but somebody needed to do it. And nobody has done it better before or since.

Sadly Mr Wogan died in 2016 and since that time a successor has been hard to come by. For, if anything needed satirising, it is the ESC. I understand that this year it is to be held in the UK, in the city of Liverpool actually. It should have been staged by last year's winning country. But that - unsurprisingly - happened to be Ukraine and they are currently otherwise engaged. So why is it going to the UK? I suppose a cynic would argue that it is the only way they could ever get to stage the thing these days, since the last time they won it was in 1997 with Love shine a light by a band called Katrina and the Waves. (No me neither). But actually the real reason is down to the fact that last year's UK song came second to the Ukrainian ditty.

Here in Malta the ESC is a national obsession. We love it and can hardly wait for it to come round each May, when we can once more exhibit our penchant for self flagellation as we, yet again, fail to win the bloody thing. It is a constant mystery to me just why we are so fixated on such a shallow, trashy contest. It's not even as though we are any good at it. Correct me if I'm wrong but... apart from a couple of times back in the 1990s our participation has merely underlined the fact that we tend to put forward only inept songs sung by tone-deaf participants.

Nevertheless, however badly we do, the crowds will still gum up the arrivals area at Malta International Airport to greet the returning participant(s) en masse. Some years back I was returning from a work trip via the Rome to Malta afternoon flight. I happened to be returning on the Monday after the ESC finals night in some eastern European city. Unbeknown to me the male singer who had competed on behalf of Malta, was on the same flight. As I came through into the arrivals area I was somewhat taken aback to find the whole space taken up with literally hundreds of my fellow countrymen and mostly countrywomen, shouting and screaming the name of, what turned out to be, the guy who had sung for Malta on the previous Saturday evening at the ESC.

After clarifying with the driver from our office who picked me up at MIA, what the hell the crowds were doing at the airport; I then asked how then we had fared in the song contest. I believe he said something like: "OK I think." So I left it at that. I later discovered that, in fact, Malta had actually placed last. I could only hazard a guess at the sort of crowd that would have shown up at MIA had we won... or maybe even come next to last.

To end on a positive note: if the Eurovision Song Contest really does matter to you, I trust you are happy this morning... or...