“Oh my God, it’s The Footy Show”, I thought to myself as I watched the opening moments of the third heat of this year’s Melodifestivalen, the Swedish selection process for the Eurovision Song Contest. A big boofy bloke in a dress is always hilarious, isn’t it?
Well, no actually. Even though the audience laughs, uncomfortably, there’s nothing amusing about the hosts for the contest this year. I’m sure they’re lovely people, but as hosts for Melodifestivalen, their humour comes across as self-indulgent, forced, and ultimately, fairly lame.
Despite the awful hosts, I quite liked a lot of the songs on this week’s show. The opening “Nine Inch Nails” inspired rock and roll song was great. The second track, “Red” by EKO was also really impressive. A day or so later, I’m still singing along to the chorus of “All We Are” from the State Of Drama. But as soon as the songs were over, and having endured the awful interval act, I switched the television off. I caught up with the results on Twitter.
There’s something deeply unsatisfactory about this year’s Melodifestivalen. As @scandipop tweeted, “Oh God even Björn Gustafsson is dying on his arse. Why can’t they get anything outside of the songs right this year?!”
My other favourite tweet about the night was about Shirley Clamp. Wickedly, @melodipopvision observed “(Shirley is just out the back, swigging on a bottle and fielding calls from Stockholm gay clubs about the #melfest finalen weekend.)” I love Shirley Clamp. She’s had some really wonderful songs over the years, and would probably be called “Melodifestivalen Royalty”. That’s the problem I guess. In the same way, the televoting has rejected the likes of Alcazar and Army Of Lovers in recent years in favour of the younger “Idol” acts, disappointingly, Shirley never even made it to the second chance heat.
The other great comeback of the week was the duo by Dr Alban – “Sing Hallelujah” – and Jessica Folker. On paper, there was so much potential. In reality, there was too much Dr Alban and not enough Jessica, unfortunately. They made it through, but only just.
Though the selected artists might change, there’s one constant in Melodifestivalen this year: the weekly appearances of song-writer, Fredrik Kempe. My friend Graeme thinks I’m too harsh in my criticism of Kempe. For his part, Graeme recognises that Fredrik has contributed some really great songs to Melodifestivalen over the last few years, and that, being a smallish country, the song-writer gene pool obviously doesn’t go that deep. For my part, I don’t think it’s acceptable that his songs have been selected in all three heats so far. Surely he’s not back next week for the fourth?
That said, if I had to choose between never seeing Fredrik Kempe again, and never seeing this year’s Melodifestivalen hosts again, Fredrik would win hands down.