Weaver's Week 2025-04-06

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Yes, it's the annual Eurovision Song Contest preview edition.

Contents 1 Six songs, for and against Europe 1.1 "Voyage" – Zoë Më, representing SRG SSR 1.2 "Milkshake man" – Go-Jo, representing SBS 1.3 "Laika party" – Emmy, representing RTÉ 1.4 "What the hell just happened?" – Remember Monday, representing BBC 1.5 "Serving" – Miriana Conte, representing PBS 1.6 "Freedom" – Mariam Shengelia, representing GPB 1.7 The other contenders 2 In other news 2.1 Quizzy Mondays

Six songs, for and against Europe

Because we don't have time to cover all the entries, we're going to concentrate on six: the anglophone broadcasters, last year's senior winners, and last year's Junior Eurovision winners. We're going to give first impressions: can this song get a televote from us, what are the broadcasters' realistic expectations? And we're going to get a couple of things off our chest, so they don't need to clog up the main reviews in May.

The running order is the running order, the order in which the songs will appear in the semi-finals.

"Voyage" – Zoë Më, representing SRG SSR

14½th of 15 competition entries in the Tuesday semi-final.

Zoë has a fragile, breathy vocal, over a very classical strings-and-piano backing. There are some interesting vocal effects behind her in the chorus, which is a gently rising and faintly warming tune. The lyric is about companionship and togetherness: "you will understand that flowers are more beautiful when you water them" sounds a heck of a lot better when it's sung in French.

The video features Zoë milling about on a zebra crossing, while all sorts of people cross the road around her – an old couple, a young girl, a man in a builder's outfit. Throughout the clip, Zoë is in a warm orange glow, picked out and standing out from everyone else in the shadows.

Just when we're relaxing into the song, there are harsh chords on the strings, and Zoë sounds concerned. It's amplified in the video clip, the people start running on the zebra crossing, and there are very quick flashes of flowers in full bloom. And then the dusk lifts, the skies lighten, and Zoë sounds relaxed again.

It's a very classy entry, perhaps proper art – for this column, the song evokes student memories of woozy nights listening to Enya knockoffs and half-watching artsy films in a language nobody understood. Will the emotion connect across the continent? It might do, but it's going to be a difficult song to sell. Will anybody be motivated to tap it on the app, or send an SMS in support? That's less clear; this song will appreciate the song from the head, but the heart gives no real call to vote for it.

Our assessment: this will do decently well with the juries, perhaps most strongly from other languages based in Latin. We fear it will struggle in the televote, and we don't see a path to Eurovision returning to Lake Geneva next year. And that may be SRG SSR's ambition: host the show and hand over to some other sucker.

"Milkshake man" – Go-Jo, representing SBS

1st in the Thursday semi.

Three minutes on the dial, make mine a 99. The video clip opens with a shot of an ice-cream van, and a tune that is almost, but not entirely, the traditional folk tune "Greensleeves". Then we zoom in on the driver's seat, where Go-Jo himself sits behind the steering wheel, and introduces himself as "the milkshake man", offering all sorts of flavours.

Action in the video then cuts to a spookily-lit room, dressed with paper chains and fairy lights, where young women are eagerly filling their cups with a viscous white liquid. It's about as subtle as being hit over the head with a large brick wrapped in slices of avocado.

The juries are asked to assess Eurovision songs on a number of criteria, including vocal capacity and performance. Although Go-Jo is never out of his comfort zone, he does manage to hold a tune and occasionally break from chest into throat voice. Much of the vocal impression is done by the backing singers, and this will count against the song.

We're intrigued as to how the party in the ice-cream van will be represented in the Basel arena: it will take careful shot direction and clever use of angles to replicate the hedonistic atmosphere. The middle eight is surely a call-and-response with the crowd in the arena, it's going to get a great reception in the hall. Not this column's choice, though we completely see why it's going to be popular.

Our assessment: with the semi-finals being 100% televote, this is going to go through quite easily. We have a nasty feeling that it'll be this year's "Je me casse": the producers will attempt to bring it down, give a poor spot in the running order, and fourths amongst the televote on Thursday will become ninths on Saturday. There's not much for the juries to love, and we suspect a spot below halfway. After last year's shellacking, SBS will be glad to get through to the final, anything more is a bonus.

"Laika party" – Emmy, representing RTÉ

3rd on Thursday.

Readers may remember how RTÉ used to dominate the Eurovision Song Contest, winning four years out of five in the mid-90s. The one time they missed was with an Irish act who didn't apply for their home contest, but went to represent NRK and brought the contest to Norway. The sands of time have swirled around, and now Norwegian singer Emmy returns the favour.

"Laika party" is nominally about the first dog in space, and perhaps a dream inspired by that one-way ticket out of the world. The song is a dance banger, lots of thudding beats and simple synthesised riffs, rising into a rave crescendo in the post-chorus; those of us who remember dance music of the 1990s will find something to hook on. Emmy has a clipped nasal delivery, like quite a lot of woman singers from Norway, and the song has been built to bring the best out of this unusual intonation.

For the video, Emmy and her backing dancers are in silver foil space suits, dancing in a blackened studio while a spotlight plays in the background. The figures are picked out by pink-purple lights, which is very effective. This is something they could easily replicate on the Eurovision stage – or the Top of the Pops studio of 1989.

The song's structure is conventional to a fault: verse-chorus-postchorus, verse-chorus-postchorus, then a key change as the chorus repeats to fade. It feels a bit like they've run out of song and still have to get up to three minutes, and the song we do hear is a bit bland.

Our assessment: this is likely to qualify, but might fall. Modern electropop tends to have a ceiling of about 15th overall, but seems to do better amongst the general public. Will there be a reason to vote from the song? Perhaps not; much will depend on the staging. Will we remember it from the recaps and think, "yeah, could see that again"? Very possibly. Are there six songs even less likely to qualify? Very possibly. RTÉ will be happy to get through to Saturday; if "Laika party" does get through that's about its limit.

"What the hell just happened?" – Remember Monday, representing BBC

Position 6½ on Thursday.

Throughout the current century, BBC entries have often come from performance and casting shows. We've had Jessica Garlick from Pop Idol, she did rather well. James Fox from Fame Academy was less good, and Javine from Popstars: The Rivals failed to pop off. Then there was Andy Abraham from The X Factor (last), Joe and Jake from The Voice of Holland of BBC (low), Lucie Jones from The X Factor (disappointing result) and Michael Rice from All Together Now (last).

Surely there are no more talent shows left for them to raid? Well, there's Got What It Takes?, but Lola Young has other priorities this year. And then we're scrabbling around: right down to obscurities like My Camp Rock, a late-aughts Disney Channel commission to tie in with their Original Movie™. But, even by this column's standards, My Camp Rock is something we wouldn't remember, and surely nobody else does.

Holly-Anne Hull, the original My Camp Rock champion, is one third of Remember Monday, alongside Lauren Byrne and Charlotte Steele. Their band was formed while they were at school, and have generally been described as country-tinged pop. The BBC describe their entry as if "Abba and Sam Ryder have teamed up with the cast of Six: The Musical, got blackout drunk and tried to recreate 'Bohemian rhapsody' from memory."

They're not kidding. The song opens with a perfectly-enunciated explanation of the scene, making a connection with the viewers. Then the beat kicks in, there's a call-out for the audience – except the vocal re-starts before the count to four completes. We've not yet seen the sheet music for this song, but it sounds like they're starting the vocal lines a beat before the corresponding melody line, which is utterly unconventional and will require extreme commitment to pull off live.

As the song progresses, the tempo changes, speeds up and slows down in a dizzyating manner, but always returns to the chorus – sung slowly and clearly, a showcase for the group's vocal abilities. That the song spends its last minute recapping the earlier events is probably a good thing – we will become more accustomed to the ideas second time round. And this is the entry we watched on Thursday, forgot about, and woke up humming on Saturday morning.

The video shows our trio gallivanting around a country mansion, while wearing ballgowns. It's fast and frenetic and works well with the story. We can imagine this is going to be translated onto the stage in a frenetic performance, full of fast cuts and precision choreography. If they can get it to work, the sky could be the limit.

Why does the BBC select its Eurovision entries without consulting the public? This is why. Internal selections allow the Beeb to take a creative risk, to bring out talent that might otherwise be overlooked by the navel-gazing pop machine. "What the hell just happened?" is a massive risk: the performance on stage could go wrong, the dancing might not work out, juries could be put off by the tale of drunken hedonism, a rotten placement by the producers might sink chances in the final. If it whiffs, it will be bottom five. This column hopes to see the song comfortably in the top half, perhaps scoring more from the televote than the juries.

"Serving" – Miriana Conte, representing PBS

9th for Thursday's semi.

Few people have done more to damage television than Mary Whitehouse. The self-proclaimed "moral guardian" made a public nuisance of herself, by exploiting an older generation's fear that television was (in some ill-defined way) corrupting the nation's youth. Because she cloaked herself in the guise of an ordinary housewife, Whitehouse could pretend to represent "the silent majority", when she was actually a very loud minority of one. And the tabloid press have always loved to side with "the silent majority", and whip up moral panics about new media: readers may wish to compare Whitehouse's selective and self-serving campaign against television with contemporary arguments about (say) mobile phones in schools.

One of Whitehouse's most pernicious legacies is the assumption that swearing on television while children are watching cannot be justified. Following a series of ill-considered decisions by successive administrations in London, the rules about language have been outsourced to OFCOM, an arms-length part of the government. OFCOM claims to be independent of government, yet cannot point to a decision that goes against government policy, or offends those in power.

OFCOM has had a number of "consultations" on swearing language in television; all of them start from the assumption that swearing is bad, and do not permit this assumption to be challenged. OFCOM are literally begging the question, their whole questionnaire is predicated on the presumption it's meant to prove. Such lax and illogical rules make OFCOM look foolish, and the whole of Europe is about to mock them.

The original title of PBS's song was "Kant", the Maltese language word for "song". In the performance, in the chorus, Miriana Conte sings how she is "do-re-me-fa-so-s-s-s-serving" just such a song. However, it would be very easy for a listener who hadn't heard the song before to mishear the words and think that Miriana was serving something else entirely. And it would be very easy for a cloth-brained regulator to accept this incorrect interpretation and give the BBC a stern ticking-off, and quite possibly levy a fine.

So that this doesn't happen, the EBU (at the behest of an un-named broadcaster) insisted that PBS amend the song so that it was less likely to be misinterpreted. Now, the ditty will just have a gap in the vocal where the original title would have been, and we expect the crowd will fill in the blank.

None of this alters the song: it's an empowerment anthem, with the rather telling pre-chorus "Why should we let other people decide?" almost as if PBS had planned this controversy. "Serving" is a modern pop song, highly-processed beat, some processing on the vocals that they may or may not be able to replicate on stage. There's a massive pop drop after the title line, a repeated synth riff to draw attention through music. The whole package is going to be familiar to people who go out to gay clubs; this column finds it rather monotonous and suggest that it offers nothing past the first chorus. The video shows Miriana, and we don't have much more to say about it.

There will be enough fan support to get this song through to the final, where it will run into the problem of being a not very distinguished song in a sea of better options. It'll get a dollop from the televote, likely a few points from the jurors, but we don't expect to see PBS much above halfway on the right hand side.

"Freedom" – Mariam Shengelia, representing GPB

Thursday's number 10.

Last time that Eurovision came to Switzerland, it was from a young woman singing a power ballad really well. GBP attempt to recapture that sprit with their entry.

The music video appears to have been filmed at the national studios, so we can expect Mariam to wear a flowing red dress, while people behind dance and chant. Lots of red lights, more flickering than we'd like to see. If we clocked the beat correctly, this is in 10/8 time, a very unusual tempo with emphasised beats arriving later than we expect. The tempo breaks for the chorus, allowing Mariam to show her vocal abilities, which perhaps aren't as strong as she might hope. The second half of the song's in English, giving some international appeal and making her message clearer.

Two external factors might drag it down. One is the draw: "Freedom" comes immediately after "Serving", and the very complex beginning to "Freedom" may cause viewers to tune out and miss their cue. And it's followed by the France Télévisions entry "Maman", performed by Louane, and likely to eclipse "Freedom" completely.

The other factor dragging it down is international politics: the current regime in Tbilisi has adopted policies drawing away from Europe and closer to Russia, in spite of the people of Georgia preferring closer ties with Europe and voting for them in an election ignored by the regime. Mariam has previously spoken in favour of the current regime. There isn't much love for the Georgian government amongst the Eurovision fans, and this animus appears to spread to the Song Contest entry.

But, ultimately, we don't think "Freedom" is going through to Saturday night for one simple reason: it's not good enough. Assuming Mariam doesn't improve her vocals massively from the video, she needs to get a Georgian diaspora vote, or stage the pants off a weak song, or engage in blatant vote-rigging of the sort we've never seen in Eurovision before since last year.

The other contenders

Looking at the betting odds, "Bara bada bastu" from KAJ is the early favourite, a party song in dialectical Swedish and Finnish representing SVT. Another trip to Stockholm, is it? "Maman" from France Télévisions is also favoured, as is ÖRF's entry "Wasted love", sung by JJ. There's quite some international traction for "Espresso macchiato", EER's entry has been picking up streams and airplay beyond the borders of Estonia.

Radio 2 are running a vote for Radio 2's favourite Eurovision Song Contest entry of the century so far. It's a horridly restricted list, containing all 24 winners and 43 other songs, all picked to meet stereotypes of Eurovision fans. Nothing from Junior Eurovision, which is hardly unexpected given the BBC's tepid support over the years. Nothing from TVM, the Moldovan broadcaster who will be absent in May – so no Epic Sax Guy, no door-closing hijinks. We'll search in vain for the Euro-goth tunes, "Amar pelos dois" the only representative of the Euro-jazz strain, and "We are the winners" hasn't made the cut. They've included Scooch, but not "Voila". Are they nuts?!

Semi-finals are on 13 and 15 May, with the final beginning at 8pm on 17 May.

We corrected this article after publication, having originally and incorrectly stated "Bara bada bastu" was in Finnish.

In other news

Church news We're sorry to learn that Rev. David Smith has died. He was a regular contestant on quiz and game shows in the 1980s and 1990s, once winning a pink Jacuzzi on Bruce's Price Is Right, and being offered counselling after being voted off on The Weakest Link. David's day job was as a chaplain, including at Sunderland Polytechnic, Birmingham University, and Heathrow Airport. Rev. Smith was 78 when he died in December last year.

Skating on thin ice ITV have said that there are no plans for another series of Dancing on Ice. The series, which tries to teach a bunch of minor celebrities and asks them to perform ice dances, has now been running for eight years. To be honest, we've not thought about it since the cursed 2021 series.

Many theories have been put about to explain the decision. "Nobody's watching any more" seems to be the most common reason: this year's final (the grand final!) was seen by barely 3 million people, and would only have ranked sixth in the week's game show list (behind Got Talent, The 1% Club, Gladiators, Would I Lie to You, and The Great Pottery Throw Down). Given that Dancing on Ice is expensive to produce, and can't be repeated or sold overseas, each episode needs lots and lots of viewers.

Why have viewers turned off? Some suggest that it's a reaction to Holly Willoughby and Stephen Mulhern's attempt to revive You Bet! last year. Others reckon that ousted host Phillip Schofield had more gravitas than his replacement, but Schofield was a blighter behind the scenes. There are rumours that Torvill and Dean may wish to scale back their role and gently retire from the public eye. Still others point to Strictly Come Dancing and think, the BBC are doing it better and ITV are just showing me-too Strictly.

The viewers have spoken, ITV have listened, and we hope for something exciting for Sunday evenings next winter.

Who's in the house? "Why is it that every single politician who gets rehabilitated through reality television is right wing?" asked a friend recently. The trend started in 2006, when George Galloway slinked up to Celebrity Big Brother, got reminded of his time with War On Want, and slunk away with his tail firmly between his legs.

The BB studio subsequently played host to Tommy Sheridan, a socialist who hadn't yet been charged with perjury against liespaper News of the World. Not until its final year on air did Channel 5 bother to invite an ex-MP – they went for Strictly Come Dancing failure Anne Widdecombe.

ITV's big reality show these days is I'm a Celebrity, which has given a platform to Robert Kilroy-Shaft and Nigel Farage (multiple right-wing populist parties), Brian Paddick (Lib Dem peer), Lembit Öpik (Lib Dem end-of-the-pier), Edwina Currie and Matt Hancock (Conservative running jokes), Kezia Dugdale (Labour). Over on Strictly Come Dancing, the regular series has hosted Ann Widdecombe and Edwina Currie, also Ed Balls and Jacqui Smith (Labour).

Looking at the historical record, it's a reasonably balanced list. However, the recent years have shown a marked prevalence for right-wingers, which will be continued if the rumours about Celeb Big Brother are correct.

Quizzy Mondays

Claire Reynolds won this week's semi-final on Mastermind. We were surprised to see her here: Claire had lost to Nancy Braithwaite in the first heat, but came back as a top runner-up when Mike Noyes could not take part in the semi-finals. For the second chance, Claire took the Birmingham statesman Joseph Chamberlain, and came close to a perfect round. She then scored 15 on general knowledge, and anyone who can do that deserves their place in the final.

Phil Nowek had a one-point lead after his specialist subject of Blackadder, but couldn't quite get over the finish line. Lewis Jones had a different problem, completely fluffed his specialist round on The Legend of Zelda video game, but hit the general knowledge round out of the park with a score of 15. Rashmi Bhardwaj took Gregory Peck and put up a respectable performance in both rounds.

"Your questions are on types of seaweed." UCL won their University Challenge re-match against Open, pulling away in the final few minutes to win by 235-105. Open actually had the best of the early starters, and did well on the bonuses they heard. But UCL won a lot of the close buzzer races, and scooted away with two bonuses from every three they heard. They even got a set on patience in English football.

A new series of Celebrity Big Brother begins (ITV and various Virgin Media channels, from Monday). Interior Design Masters starts its new series (BBC1, Thu). Next Saturday brings us the Gladiators final (BBC1), potato peelings on 99 to Beat (ITV), and Bonnie Langford on The Weakest Link (BBC1). Ancient editions of Celebrity Mastermind are on the Eden channel. A winner is found on Home of the Year (RTÉ1, Tue).

We don't plan to publish next week, so join us over Easter weekend.

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