Well, at leastthere was no booing this time. After the hullabaloo over Israel’s Eurovision entrant being heckled on stageduring Tuesday’s first semi-final, Thursday’s second was a much less controversial affair.
It was almostrelentlessly energetic in Vienna, and Europe also got its first glimpse of the man looking to end 29 years of hurt for Britain. Even though he did not need to qualify for the final – by virtue of the UK being one of the “big four” given a bye to Saturday’s showpiece event because of the amount of funding it provides – Sam Battle debuted Eins, Zwei, Drei in the Austrian capital.
Performing under his mad-professor-esque alias, Look Mum No Computer, Battle lamented the drudgery of the 9-5 life but, for some inexplicable reason, found himself cheered by counting “one, two, three” in German. It was enough to get the Austrians in the crowd singing along with him.
While I liked the song enough whenthe recorded version was releasedin March, and Battle expended every last ounce of effort on stage, his live singing voice was probably not strong enough to trouble the top of the final leaderboard. In even worse news for Team GB, the BBC’s Rylan Clark and Angela Scanlon squandered a big lead against the Danish and Norwegian commentators in a quiz that filled time while the votes were counted.
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The producers know how to start with a bang. For the second semi-final in a row, proceedings started with a crowd-pleasing tub-thumper in the form of the appropriately named Bangaranga by Bulgaria’s Dara. It is a pity that it was immediately followed by the utter tedium of Just Go, a mournful ballad by Azerbaijan’s Jiva, the most exciting moment of which was when a man wearing a pork pie hat wandered on stage and promptly wandered off again.
Some favourites for the title showed why they are so highly rated to go all the way. Monroe, France’s 17-year-old starlet, hopes to make it three winners in a row who could feasibly have had a career as an opera singer; Australia’s Delta Goodrem, who is probably best-known to British viewers for her time playing Nina Tucker in Neighbours, won loud applause with Eclipse, some very obviously fake piano-playing notwithstanding; Romania’s Alexandra Căpitănescu had the crowd screaming along to Choke Me, as she sang with a weird Miss Havisham-style figure under a hood on stage.
Malta’s Adrian took out a full-page advert in Thursday’s Guardian, apparently at his own expense, to drum up support for the semi-final, and it worked. Surprisingly, he made it through.
As was the case on Tuesday, there was too much lame banter between hosts Victoria Swarovski and Michael Ostrowski, which bodes ill for Saturday’s grand final. And we could all probably have done without the several minutes of filler where it was explained that, even though it seems that Eurovision is an entirely gay jamboree, only eight of the 72 singers to have won the contest identified as being LGBTQIA+ (their initialism).
We lost a further five countries – the expected fallers of Azerbaijan, Switzerland and Latvia, and the more surprising Luxembourg and Armenia – and now all attention turns to Saturday. Let’s hope that, like Thursday,there is no booing.