LostInTheWoods

For those of you reading this outside of Europe, you may never have heard of the enigma that is “The Eurovision Song Contest”. It has been running since 1956 and every year most European countries participate, and is famous for some very achem.. extraordinary songs from all over Europe (Last years winners were Lordi, a Finnish death rock band with an unhealthy infatuation with latex masks and rubber swords).

Anyhoo, every year in Sweden they select their entry by a phone in competition TV programme that last several weeks, it is called “Melodifestivalen” (The Melody Festival, you see, Swedish isn't so hard). Now I would not normally care about this competition, but last year I was slightly hooked, and this year even more so.

I find myself shouting at the TV, getting really agitated and actually caring who gets knocked out and who goes forward to the final. At this stage this is all still internal to Sweden, but it seems the Swedes are more concerned with the final Melodifestivalen result over their participation in the Europe wide competition. A bit like Man Utd winning the Premiership over seeing England qualifying for the World Cup. Kinda.

The standard of songs seem to be higher here in Sweden than what I remember from the UK, where the whole thing is seen as a bit of a joke, which is probably why we have faired so poorly. Also, the whole thing is political, on the night of the Eurovision final, people vote for friendly neighbours, and not for old enemies and recently, nobody has voted much for the UK which it could be argued be due to us being involved in a rather unpopular war. Thanks Tony.

Being a neutral country does help (Sweden and Ireland), and also singing in English seems to increase your winning chances to.

Well next Saturday Sweden chooses their song, and my money is on Sanna Nielsen - "Vågar du, vågar jag" (Risk you, risk me), really europoppy, but I like it.

For those who know me, this is only a temporary infatuation, and it will pass. Steve Earle is still number one.

That is all.

LostInTheWoods