It is safe to surf the television channels once more, earplugs out and blindfold removed: Eurovision 2011 is over, and for the record, the final was won by Azerbaijan's Ell and Nikki with their song Running Scared.

In recent years, ratings figures show that about 100 million people tuned in to the Eurovision finals, a matter for sociologists and social workers to ponder as to why life in Europe around mid-May is so dire as to drive people to this form of desperation. Predictions were that this year there would be 120 million viewers. And to think people worry about the euro.

The television studio crew in Duesseldorf acquitted themselves brilliantly in camerawork and all other technical criteria, with the only quibble - and what is Eurovision without its democratic invitation to catty remarks - being the slightly sinister motif of the sound of a thumping heart preceding each song, each time leaving the viewer to ponder whether it was about to flatline. For all that, it was big-show television at its wide-screen, swooping-lensed best, even if someone should speak to the set designer about the fact that the team enclosures strikingly resembled giant white porcelain washbasins.

There is, indeed, something democratic about Eurovision, and that has nothing to do with the voting system. No matter how precarious a country's financial position (Greece, Spain), no matter how uncertain its prospects of European Union membership (Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey), no matter its reluctance about other forms of European integration such as the euro and Schengen (Denmark) and no matter even geography (Azerbaijan) all that is needed is a ditty, a dance routine and dozens and dozens of votes, and there it is, competing on that glittering stage, somehow reminiscent of the transporter platform on the Starship Enterprise.

This year's song-transition touch was to show individuals as representatives of countries competing in the final, some of them ironically emblematic of their relative places in the European food chain: Switzerland represented by a car racing team, Moldova by a chap who cleans the windows of the television tower in Berlin's Alexanderplatz.

So it is all over until 2012, bar a final comment on what would be a suitable test for Eurovision, even if it would be the antithesis of television - holding the whole thing on radio, so that the songs would be judged as songs alone. But that, no doubt, would be heresy to the 100 million faithful.