Finally! After months of TV time wasted on women clad in red and trapped in future New England, KGB spies pretending to be American suburbians and bodyguards sleeping with middle-aged, British MPs. After a long time with nothing else to fight about than whether Donald Trump was worse today than yesterday, whether Sweden is going to find a government in time for next Melodifestivalen and whether the EU is better off without Great Britain, just like the rest of us. After countless parties with polite conversations, careful mingling and not a sequin or toilet doll in sight, we hit Eurovision season.
Oh, how we welcome these days of pure joy, lilacs and laughter. How we long for dishy men in hotpants, bitchy boys from Sweden, instruments never seen outside of Eastern Europe and WTFs from Spain. How we cannot wait for the next attempt to conquer the world from Italy. And how we cannot wait to start satirizing about the people’s democratic republic of Israel!
The national selections just started and the gossip is well on its way. This is what we noticed so far:
The first country to select their entry was Albania, as their artist Jonida Maliqi presented her song Ktheju tokës right before Christmas. Now, there’s a couple of spelling exercises for us. But we love that the ethnics are secured already. And Jonida has a fabulous dress that looks like it’s designed by Vika Gazinskaya’s Albanian twin. Way to go to please both us and the Russians!
Serhat is back for San Marino! We are truly thrilled! He’s like Valentina, only with a voice and a penis! Must make an interview with him to ask if he ever managed to get that paternity test out of Leonard Cohen.
And according to all kinds of rumors, Sergey Lazarev is back for Russia with a song made by Phillipp Kirkorov? That’s almost too much to take in at present stage. We can only pray that Agnete doesn’t pick up on the trend, and we’ll be all set for a legendary Stockholm reunion. Then again, we happen to know a thing or two about the Russians and their relationship with fake news, so we will hold our Yakutian horses and heat flashes for a couple minutes more.
Also, Spain selected something. Please let us have a break and a Kit Kat before we comment on that.
We were ready for greatness from Czech Republic as they were robbed last year and we are craving a trip to Prague. But as we plow through 12 acts of yelling ladies and Salvador wannabies, we are not instantly seing it for them this year either. They do have a song called Space sushi, though. Let’s root for that one, as we are desperate to see Major Tom rolled up in seaweed.
Fabulous Duncan Laurence is going to represent The Netherlands. He is not only hotlist material, he also graduated from one of the schools Astrid cooperates with. Surely we have a sure Top 10 secured already for this guy. With some serious competition from their neighbour Belgium‘s kid Eliot.
Norway‘s newspaper VG claims Chris Medina is going to participate in MGP. Guess we are the only country left wanting to cooperate with the US these days. But hey, he does know how to sing and we’re eager to see who he is up against come Friday.
Italy is well on their way with the SanRemo festival and we are seeing lots of promo videos with the fabulous Eddy. But their web page is as chaotic as ever, so we have no clue if there will be good entries or not. But at least there seem to be some promising artists.
Other countries also chose their national finalists. But listen up, Serbia and Ukraine. If you want busy international journalists interested in your national selections, please present us with a bit less than 25 finalists, will you? You’re killing us over here.
Some countries, like Australia, France, Germany and the Baltics, are presenting a few people at the time, which makes them impossible to follow, but we look forward to their decision. Also, Portugal presented a lot of pretty and nice in Portuguese, but we are not ready to judge yet.
Wiwi Bloggs is even better than last year, of course. If they go on like this, we might not need music soon. We can all just stay home and watch them talk…sorry, slay for 20 minutes at a time in gazillion videos on YouTube about how lucky the guys getting near them are. That’ll save us all an awful lot of money. And political controversies.
But not this year. Oh no, Israel. We are ready for you and your Jaffa oranges. We’ll be back after this with the reviews!