Hello. Yes, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? But the arrival of May heralds the Coming of the Contest and Twitter just isn’t up to the task of telling all I have to tell about this year’s Eurovision.

My pre-show pontificating is divided into three posts: one for each semi-final (of which, you will correctly surmise, there are two) and one for the final. On your behalf, I’ve endured all of this year’s songs and compiled some brief thoughts. I’ve linked the country name to the song’s video on the official Eurovision YouTube channel to make it as easy as possible for you to agree with me (or disagree, if you’re crazy).

As has been the case for a few years now, the large number of participating countries means we’re treated to semi-finals in order to whittle the songs down to a barely manageable final. Fear not: the UK’s financial contribution to the competition means we never have to go through the indignity of being knocked out in the first round. We’ll be voting for the songs in second semi-final, so we’ll only get to cast formal judgement on these if they make it through to the big event, which is being held in Azerbaijan on Saturday 26th May. In some cases, I really hope we’re spared.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at the countries who’ve been drawn in the first semi-final.

The Good

The ones I liked and hope to see get through to the next stage, in alphabetical order:

• Greece have a strong track record of memorable, up tempo Eurovision entries and this is very much in that vein. It’s almost Eurovision by numbers – pick a one word title (in this case the suitably exotic sounding Aphrodisiac) and contrive a song around it – with the musical production updated for 2012. I’m not complaining: this is surely one for the final and it’s the only one of the entrants to lodge itself unbidden inside my head.
• Next up is Maureen Lipman‘s favourite Eurovision country: Hungary. This one keeps just on the right side of über earnest and I really like the musical production (though how that will translate on the night is anyone’s guess). The last Hungary song I liked was Dance With Me in 2009 and that sank without a trace, so I’m hoping for better luck this time.
• Iceland will hope to put European prejudices against ash clouds and defaulting banks behind them, and with Never Forget they may. I rather like the video, with its Icelandic scenescape, but more importantly I like the song. I’m a sucker for atmospheric strings, syncopated percussion and a male-female counterpoint – even if there is a touch of Evanescence to it. Since they then add a sudden silence (which I hope survives in the live version) and a key change, I’d put this straight through to the final. (You may remember Jónsi’s cheekbones from such Eurovisions as 2004, where he performed 19th-placed power ballad Heaven.)
• Ireland – I’d never heard Jedward sing before last year’s contest, having not seen whichever talent show from which they emerged, and this year they’re back for a second helping of Eurovision. Waterline feels like it’s fallen off a Stock, Aitken and Waterman landfill of leftover pop songs, but that’s by no means a bad thing. It could do well – although I wouldn’t be surprised if the twins’ live performance falls short of the recorded version, which could impact on their chances. Either way, it needs to accompany a training montage in a 1980s action film as soon as possible.
• Moldova – It’s cheesy as sin – worse, it’s cheesy as actual cheese – but it’s one of many songs in this first semi-final with a winning cheerfulness that keeps the whole thing bouncing along quite happily. A nice instrumental in the middle and a ska jazz feel make it a keeper.
• Romania – Bagpipes, drums and accordion are all part of Zaleilah‘s charm. I suspect the lyrics mean nothing of note but this is a bit of light fun and begs to be served with rum.

The Bad

There’s a disappointing dearth of truly terrible entries this year – I don’t know what the other countries think they’re playing at – but there are certainly some songs I’d like to see taken down the knacker’s yard and put out of our misery. For example…

• Austria – Yes, they are genuinely using the band name Trackshittaz. To their credit, it’s an appropriate name, because, to their deficit and excuse mon français, the track is utterly shit. Awful, shouty rubbish. Still, sung in German, “Woki mit deim Popo” sounds rude, so at least that’s entertaining.
• Denmark – I’ve often loved overlooked Danish entries (and pastries, for that matter), and now that we all love The Killing and Borgen, could it be Denmark’s year? No, no it won’t. Soluna Samay is so middle of the road, her only chance of creating excitement is if she trips over the cat’s eyes. Tiresome.
• Latvia – Oh cripes: it’s a Eurovision song about recording a song for Eurovision, and its winning no fans here with the lyric “I was born in distant 1980”. A Eurovision fan friend asked me a few weeks ago whether singer Anmary was in on the joke. I really hope so. Yes, it’s catchy, but so’s smallpox. If the lyrics were in foreign, this might be passable – as it is, it’s hideous and deserves to be burned. Right now.
• Russia – The Eurovision gays won’t be in any hurry for Russia to host the contest again so this dreadful chorus line of singing grannies could be perfect news, if only we didn’t have to listen to it. That said, it does run the major risk of picking up a shedload of “ironic” votes from across the continent. The dancing is only marginally more co-ordinated than Pan’s People, the singing is less tuneful than Jemini and the song itself is dire, so anything could happen.
• San Marino – “Do you wanna be more than just a friend? Do you wanna play cybersex again? If you wanna come to my house then click me with your mouse.” Those lyrics alone tell you all you need to know about the horror that is The Social Network Song. Someone’s noticed that the internet’s a thing and decided to write a sub-Whigfield pun-laden Eurovision entry about it – and then autotuned it to death. And the social networks have spoken: its YouTube Dislikes are outnumbering its Likes by more than three to one. “Oh oh – uh – oh oh” indeed.

The Ugly

Some songs defy categorisation, and they’re the ones I’ve included in this category:

• Sometimes Israel give us a stonking pop song; sometimes it’s a terribly worthy ballad about how good it would be if everyone just got along; and sometimes it’s just bizarre. This time it’s a kitch number that sounds like it’s fallen through time from one of those 1970s Top of the Pops they show on BBC Four to save them making new programmes. It’s too jolly to actively dislike but Slade were never my scene and I don’t like Star Wars. (I do like Star Wars.)
• Montenegro will open the show with Euro Neuro and we start as we might hope to go on: bonkers. It’s a strange fusion of folk instruments, funky beat and monotonous rapping, like an Eastern European Cake, and there is clear evidence the lyricist got drunk and made a series of ill-advised bets with a rhyming dictionary. For all that, the chorus is memorable (for the duration of the song).

The Rest

The remaining songs were neither particularly good, nor particularly bad. The word “meh” is frowned upon, so we’ll just call them “the rest”:

• Albania – I spent two of this song’s three minutes waiting for it to start. It eventually did (complete with some epic shrieking), but that’s not making the best use of the allocated stage time. The video’s worth a look: a woman with her legs in a box; two children drawing chalk lines on a wall; a weird bird mask; a tealight on a record player. I’m not saying Rona Nishliu doesn’t have good hair – I’ve got nothing against the hair – but I am saying this song could be better. On the other hand, it also could be worse.
• Belgium – When the drums came in a third of the way through, I was hoping this was going to turn into a big number. Instead, it just carried on as before but with drums. Sorry, Iris: this may still be better than most of whatever the kidz listen to today, but you’re no Sergio & The Ladies.
• Cyprus – Here comes the Eurodance. That’s pretty much all you need to know, and being the only track from that oeuvre in the semi, it should corner the market. It’s not bad, although nothing special for the genre – it would play quite happily in a club in Ibiza or Gran Canaria or Frinton or wherever it is one goes to take E and dance topless these days. As the title La La Love suggests, there are a lot of la la la la las – and then it abruptly stops because its three minutes are up. NB: the video appears to feature Catherine Zeta Jones being chased by Tracy Scoggins in a funny hat.
• Finland – Interestingly, this is sung in Swedish. (Look, it’s interesting to me. So Suomi.) I don’t understand a word but I’m sure it’s very poetic. The song has a pleasant, gentle melody and Anna Friel did an OK job singing it, but I can’t see it sparking a riot at Our Price or overloading the phone voting lines.
• Switzerland – Sinplus, the first rock band in this year’s contest, offer a less than subtle “follow your dreams” message. Unbreakable isn’t breaking any new ground – who is it I’m reminded of? Snow Patrol? The Pigeon Detectives? – but it fills three minutes without complaint and as the only guitar band in this semi-final, they stand a good chance of getting through. Of course, when it comes to the voting, I expect Switzerland to give everybody two points.

That’s not a bad line-up, I’d say, so expect a watchable semi-final on Tuesday 22nd May. Were we phone voting for this programme, I’d be calling up to vote for Iceland and Hungary.

Next time: eighteen more countries battle it out for ten coveted final places in Semi-Final 2. Stay tuned!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually post a summary of the Eurovision entrants around this time of year. Alas, what with elections and then post-election holidays and then going to the pub a bit, this year there will be no blog post. I know, it’s a tragedy.

However, it’s not all bad news. I’ll be live tweeting along with the Eurovision final on Saturday night on my twitter account, so much of the, er, insight that usually finds its way onto this blog will be available there. Watch out for numerous Blake’s 7 references.

You can also fill this blog-post-sized hole with my contribution to this week’s Pod Delusion podcast. You’ll find me wittering on about Eurovision (recorded in one take I’ll have you know) around 26 minutes in:

Finally, don’t forget to tune in yourself to BBC One at 8pm on Saturday (or some red buttony thing that I don’t have that gives you the lyric subtitles). I’ll be backing Denmark. Or maybe Romania. Or maybe Albania. I haven’t quite made up my mind. And whereas last year I correctly predicted (for once) that Norway would storm to victory, there’s no such obvious victor this year.

As I’ve been working my way through the House of Cards trilogy recently (what better way to get in the mood for a General Election?), this week’s list is fictional British Prime Ministers from off of the telly. Minor spoilers for old dramas follow.

• From House of Cards:
  • Charles Henry Collingridge – Margaret Thatcher’s successor, who makes the mistake of leaving Francis Urquhart unpromoted
  • Francis Urquhart – F.U. himself, a ruthless right-wing PM brought brilliantly to life by Ian Richardson
• Maureen Graty – the British PM who appears briefly in the sixth season of The West Wing, played by Pamela Salem – and as far as I know, fact fans, she’s the only actor from either Doctor Who or Blake’s 7 to have appeared in The West Wing
• Michael Phillips – Robert Bathurst’s occupant of Number 10 in the BBC sitcom My Dad’s the Prime Minister
• Tom Davis – second PM (and the first named) in The Thick of It, although he’s not seen on screen
• From the Doctor Who universe:
  • “Jeremy” – the PM during The Green Death – assumed to be former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe
  • “Madam” – there’s a female PM on the phone in Terror of the Zygons – possibly Shirley Williams
  • Joseph Green – MP for Hartley Dale and acting PM in World War Three, although he’s actually Jocrassa Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen in disguise
  • Harriet Jones – Penelope Wilton’s MP for Flydale North, she is Prime Minister in The Christmas Invasion
  • Harold Saxon – John Simm as the Master, perhaps having benefited from the Doctor’s quiet overthrowing of Harriet Jones
  • Brian Green – played by Nicholas Farrell (also of To Play the King), he was PM during Torchwood: Children of Earth
• Kevin Pork – in Whoops Apocalypse, portrayed by Peter Jones
• Ros Pritchard – Jane Horrocks’s eponymous character in The Amazing Mrs Pritchard (which prompted a lot of discussion on Lib Dem Voice)
• From The Pallisers:
  • Joshua Monk – Liberal PM in Trollope’s The Duke’s Children, played by Bryan Pringle
  • The Duke of Omnium – from Trollope’s The Prime Minster, played by Philip Latham
• Michael Stevens – Anthony Head’s PM in Little Britain
• Harry Perkins – the star of A Very British Coup, Ray McAnally’s socialist PM is almost the diametrical opposite of Francis Urquhart (the book was by Chris Mullin, subsequently a Labour MP himself but standing down this year)
• Jim Hacker – last but by no means least, Paul Eddington takes the title role in Yes, Prime Minister, one of the best sitcoms ever made

And here’s a fact I stumbled across while checking the information in this list – the replica House of Commons often seen in TV dramas since the 1980s was built for the ITV adaptation of First Among Equals and is now owned by TV writer Paul Abbott.

The run up to the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest has begun. Many countries have already chosen their songs and singers. We know the UK’s song will be written by Dennis Pete Waterman. And this got me wondering: which songs from last year’s competition have faded into (even greater) obscurity and which are still being listened to?

There are a handful of tracks from last year that still come into my head occasionally. The winner, Fairytale; Ukraine’s Be My Valentine; Hungary’s pretty unsuccessful Dance With Me; Slovenia’s Love Symphony; Sweden’s La Voix. But what about the rest of the world who aren’t me?

Fortunately, there’s a way to get an idea. last.fm is a website that keeps track of your listening habits, if you so desire. It has thousands of users and it’s possible to look up the listening figures for any given track. So I’ve gone through last year’s entries and counted up the number of plays each has had in the last six months.

Before I give you the results, there are some caveats. For a start, it’s not going to be an objective measure of the songs themselves as the results of the Contest will skew the figures. The winner in particular had lots more exposure as a result, and the songs that didn’t progress from the semi-finals weren’t broadcast to the same audience as the final. Also, I’m aware that the songs I’ve played have tended to be served up by the shuffle feature on my iPod – so those listens are less about those songs being high quality than not being bad enough for me to have skipped to the next track. Plus, there’s no record of which country these listens came from – most could be in the entry’s home country (they couldn’t vote for it during the show) and the size of the last.fm user base in each country will make a difference.

Then there’s the problem of disambiguation. Not least because of the different languages involved, but also because of the generally inconsistent taxonomies of people’s audio collections, tracks are listed on last.fm under variations of their titles and variations of their artist. And it’s case sensitive. For example, Ukraine’s entry appears separately under

• Be My Valentine by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine (Anti-crisis girl) by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine! (Anti-Crisis Girl) by Svetlana Loboda
• Be My Valentine! (Anti-crisis Girl) [Ukraine] by Svetlana Loboda
• Be my Valentine (Anti-crisis girl) by Светлана Лобода

and more. I’ve mostly taken all the entries among the 15 top tracks shown by default on the artist page. This works against singers who’ve had lots of other hits under the same name (or who share their name with another group), so where the impact of that was large I’ve looked further down the list to include more plays. I’ve attempted to go through all the obvious variations of artist names – so for “A & B” I also looked up “A feat. B”, “A feat B”, “A and B”, and “A”. I’ve included remixes, radio edits and different translations of the songs.

That all said, here are the results of the people-still-listening-to-Eurovision-2009-entries jury.

…which suggests that the Europe-wide voting public got it roughly right.

It’s no surprise that Alexander Rybak is in first place by miles, averaging six listens an hour by last.fm users in the last six months. Iceland’s second place in the competition is also accurately reflected by the listening figures – less predictably – and France’s Patricia Kaas appears in 8th place in both the results and the listening figures.

The songs that seem to have been more popular than their results suggested are from Estonia, the UK, and in particular Germany and Sweden. Turkey and Azerbaijan are a little lower in the listener counts. Finland’s entry Lose Control by Waldo’s People, deserves a special mention: it came last in the Eurovision final but is the 5th most listened to. Although this could be the result of last place notoriety, it’s more likely genuine success, either restricted to their home country or, given the style of the song, in the Eurodance world.

The three songs that finished in the top 10 on the night but not in this chart are Greece’s This Is Our Night (four places lower), Bosnia & Herzegovina’s Bistra Voda (nine places lower, although I rather liked it), and Armenia’s Jan Jan (a whopping 14 places lower). The highest placed semi-finalist who didn’t make the final was (appropriately) The Highest Heights, Switzerland’s entry, which is the 19th most popular entry of the last six months.

So there you go. Pseudo-scientific. Passably interesting.

This year’s Eurovision final is on Saturday 29th May, with the semi-finals on Tuesday 25th and Thursday 27th. I’ll probably return in May with a preview – and I’ll attempt to successfully follow-up last year’s post, where, for the first time ever, I successfully predicted the winner.