Lopez Blogs

Tonight saw the final of "The World's Greatest Elvis" (BBC-1) after last week's line-up was narrowed down to five Elvii.

Firstly, Kavan, rock n'roll Elvis from Ohio, gave us his take on "Blue Suede Shoes" however marks deducted for singing "don't step on the blue suede shoe". Tut tut.

Next up was Canadian GI-Elvis Gino Monopoli, who failed to impress us at EuropeCrazy HQ because of his posh phrasing on "It's Now Or Never". And he missed the high bit at the end. Our least favourite so far.

Norge-Elvis from the comeback era, Kjell Bjoernestad a.k.a Kjell Elvis, did spookily resemble The King and (if the internet is to be believed) may have had a wee bit of help in this department. Unfortunately his "If I Can Dream" was beyone overcooked and someone really needed to cut off his windmill-arms.

We had been impressed by Britain's very own Lee "Memphis" King last week. Again this week, vocally, he was on the mark more than any other competitor in the contest, as he delivered "Way Down".

As in any contest, there's a big advantage going on last and America's Shawn Klush was in the fortunate position as pre-contest favourite as he had impressed so much last week. He did very well with "The Wonder of You".
We thought that the two finalists in the sing-off would be Lee and Shawn - but we were wrong, as the judges selected Shawn and .....Gino? Posh-Elvis? Surely some mistake.

After all the recent phone-vote scandals, there was not a phone vote in sight for this one and instead, the final decision was left to the studio audience, "Stars in their Eyes"-style, to choose their winner. Inevitably and correctly, they chose Shawn, although on the night we preferred Lee. Oh well, there you go. The TV critics may have savaged this over the past week, but we thought it was a good bit of harmless telly fun for a Saturday night, especially if you like Elvis, which we do. Uh-huh-huh. Thank you very much.