The Wedding Present Cup

                The panel must award a total of 136 points to the songs in these groups; no song may receive more than 25 points, and they must give points to at least 10 of the 16 songs. The top 4 go through to the last 32. Group B is made up of the qualifiers from groups  3  and  4  in the first stage. Group B A Million Miles Blue Eyes Octopussy Once More Something And Nothing Swimming Pools, Movie Stars Boing! Mystery Date Blonde This Boy Can Wait Crushed Click Click I'm From Further North Than You All This And More Loveslave Science Fiction The Results Once again, voting patterns varied, although in most individual cases they were broadly similar to the last group - for example, John, James and Gricey were again the only ones to give at least a point to every song. One difference was the amount of maximum 25s awarded - only 10 this time, compared to 16 in group A. The total number of zeros was very similar though (54/51). Another notable difference is that this time there was a

               The panel must award a total of 136 points to the songs in these groups; no song may receive more than 25 points, and they must give points to at least 10 of the 16 songs. The top 4 go through to the last 32. Group A is made up of the qualifiers from groups 1 and 2 in the first stage. Group A My Favourite Dress No End Credits Nobody's Twisting Your Arm  Boo Boo Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?  We Should Be Together At the Edge of the Sea Queen Anne Deer Caught in the Headlights Sports Car 2, 3, Go Let's Make Some Plans Nothing Comes Easy  Memento Mori It's A Gas The Results A bit more of a challenge for the panel to allocate their scores now that we've entered the second stage, but they seemed to cope admirably. It was interesting to see their different voting patterns: for example, three of them (John, James and Gricey) gave at least a point to all of the tracks, whereas another three (Ian, Bob and Kirk) used their full complement of six zeros. Th

              Statistics from the first stage Now that we've reached the end of the first stage, I have the opportunity to peruse my spreadsheet and provide you with some stats.  It's worth noting, of course, that each song's performance was at least partially dependent on the group in which it appeared. For example,  Take Me!,  Flying Saucer,  Dare and  Niagara w ould all probably have scored much more highly had they not been pitted against each other in group 16 . If you take my blog as a guide, then group 5 was the strongest overall, followed by group 9 and group 2 . Group 15 w as the weakest, closely rivalled by groups 10 and 11 .  (Not that everyone agreed whole-heartedly with my evaluations, of course, but in the majority of cases, the comments suggested a reasonably strong correlation.)  Highest winning scores (The highest possible score is 204. Average mark shown in brackets.) 186 Interstate 5 (10.94) 185 Bewitched (10.88) 181 Dalliance (10.65) 180 You Should

               Group 16 Jumper Clown Flying Saucer Dare Not From Where I'm Standing  Getting Nowhere Fast Pleasant Valley Sunday Niagara Take Me! Model, Actress, Whatever... Stop Thief England Our Lips Are Sealed  Shake It American Tan Cumberland Gap The Results In my summary of the statistics from the first stage (which I will post shortly after this), one of the measures I will include is the highest total scores. Of course, this is highly dependent on the overall quality of songs in each group. This is worth mentioning here, as ' Take Me!' , ' Flying Saucer' , ' Dare' and ' Niagara' formed a very strong top four that was streets ahead of the rest - and being pitted against each other undoubtedly meant that their scores were not as high as they might have been in different company. I shall reserve most of the the judges' comments on these songs for future rounds, only noting that Kirk - ever the outlier - declared himself to be 'bored'

   There were only half a dozen tracks that failed to get a single point in the first stage - all of them cover versions. White Christmas ( Group 1 ) Caroline No ( Group 3 ) Whole Wide World ( Group 4 ) High ( Group 5 ) Back For Good ( Group 10 ) Lovin' You ( Group 10 ) Home page