It’s time for esc-chat.com’s weekly round-up of all the news from the world of Eurovision!

Image source: Magnus Ragnvid

On Monday, ESC 2013 host broadcaster SVT announced that the contest in May will be hosted by a solo female – and more specifically by Petra Mede, known to fans from her presentation of Melodifestivalen 2009. That year was notable for Mede’s sometimes witty and wild interludes during the shows, and while she promised at Monday’s press conference that she would keep the humour under control to a certain extent, since it doesn’t always translate across borders (remember “Hello, this is Hungary” from 2000?), we can nevertheless expect a presentation style with a good amount of quirkiness and personality.

Not much happened on Tuesday that we noticed. There were probably a few rumours about Despoina Olympiou though.

Wednesday was an important day in the calendar for Melodifestivalen aficionados – almost a separate breed of ESC fan in their own right – as SVT released the lyrics of the eight entries competing in Saturday night’s first semi-final, followed by rehearsal video clips the next day. The procedure for each week this year is that the aforementioned lyrics will be published on Wednesdays, followed by brief video clips on Thursdays and 2 minute 30 audio versions around Saturday lunchtime – apparently to discourage piracy – with the full songs only being heard for the first time during each semi-final show. In any case, there were no great surprises, with David Lindgren immediately leading the way in the bookmakers’ qualification markets (and poor Jay-Jay Johanson lagging behind with qualification odds of 69/1 on one website!).

Wednesday was also an important day for aficionados of unintentional comedy, as San Marino ignored the car-crash (well, skateboard-crash) potential of Lys Assia’s “All In Your Head” – despite constant hints and suggestions from the old dame’s Twitter team – and instead selected none other than Valentina Monetta to represent the micro-state for the second year in succession. While her song this year, “Crisalide”, promises to be mercifully social network-free, it is written by Ralph Siegel again and is described as a ballad that evolves into a dance song. Because that worked so well for “Tha ’nai erotas”. Anyway, Monetta is a perfectly decent singer when she’s allowed to be, so fingers crossed for a less embarrassing three minutes this year.

Meanwhile, the professional jury for the German final was announced, including last year’s entrant Roman Lob, perennial ESC favourite Mary Roos and Peter Urban, who has commentated on ESC for German TV since the late 1990s and can apparently tell a few tales of late-night sessions with Terry Wogan at the hotel bar.

Thursday began with the announcement of the Serbian finalists, or at least the songwriters. Local tabloids had previously reported the rumour that Željko Joksimović would try his hand again, writing a song for Nataša Bekvalac – but in the end, he was apparently rejected by the selection panel (or, indeed, was never actually in the running in the first place). Mark Paelinck is in there, though – so will this year be less BeoSong and more MaltaSong?

Russia announced that it would select internally this year. Maybe they’re worried about the grannies turning up and making a big local star sulk again. Anyway, the absence of a Russian final will be a big miss for the on-season, as they always tend to throw up more than a few intriguing and bizarre moments – whether intentionally or otherwise…

The evening saw the “second chance” semi-final in Finland, although with four of the six entries qualifying for next weekend’s final, there wasn’t a great deal of peril involved. In any case, we bade a final farewell to the entries by Rautakoura and Iina Salin and now have a line-up of eight songs that will compete for the ticket to Malmö – although fan opinion seems to think it will be a straight fight between Mikael Saari and Diandra.

On Friday, Slovenia announced its internally selected artist for this year’s contest: Hannah Mancini, who previously had a go at representing the country in its 2011 EMA final. Judging by her Facebook profile, she seems like an up-tempo kind of girl, so we can presumably expect her to deliver something with a bit of pep.

However, this announcement was immediately overshadowed by the official confirmation from CyBC that Despoina Olympiou will indeed represent the Mediterranean island in Malmö. Thank heavens for that – the tension was starting to get too much! It is said that her song will be in Greek and may be premiered at the forthcoming Greek national final.

As if that excitement wasn’t enough, Friday night saw the semi-final in Malta. With the help of wine and a good portion of sheer bloody-mindedness, our #esc chatters sat through all twelve hours and 38 songs (or so it felt), even at the risk of repeated exposure to yoghurt adverts. There were arguably no great surprises in terms of the qualifiers for the Saturday night grand final, although we were naturally disappointed to see the back of Melanie Zammit and the wonderfully titled “Loverdose”. Damn it, Zammit!

We then came to the first “Super Saturday” of the season, which required the careful juggling of several webstreams! Norway started the evening with the third Melodi Grand Prix semi-final, which seemed to be of a higher visual and musical standard than the preceding two shows. The results could be described as a mixture of the expected and the surprising: familiar face Gaute Ormåsen (3rd) and recent hit-makers Sirkus Eliassen (2nd) were always in a good position to qualify for the final, but newcomer Adelén stole the show with her catchy summer hit “Bombo” – and seemed as shocked as the rest of us when she was announced as the winner! It looks like Margaret Berger has some real competition in the final now. Looking at the #esc chat vote, we would have preferred Lucky Lips and Anina to qualify – though Adelén did round off our top three. Anyway, Norway has almost completed its final line-up now – a final producers’ wildcard is expected to be announced early next week.

Sweden’s Melodifestivalen enjoys a (perhaps understandably) high profile among ESC fans, but Saturday night’s first semi-final might be one SVT will want to forget, as it was plagued by technical glitches affecting the song recaps and the results revelation – not to mention some fairly predictable results at the top end of the scoreboard, with David Lindgren and Yohio easily grabbing the tickets to the Friends Arena. (It’s not the quite same without “direkt till Globen”, is it?) They came 1st and 3rd in our chat vote, too, so not too many complaints over here! Meanwhile, the Andra Chansen places were slightly less easy to predict, and it was Eric Gadd and Cookies N Beans who came away from Karlskrona with smiles on their faces.

Unfortunately for Hungary’s A Dal competition, it was always going to be something of a poor relation on such a Scandi-heavy night. Indeed, there are no #esc chat vote results to report – but what about the real ones? A line-up of ten solid pop songs were whittled down to six qualifiers for the next stage of the competition. Szilvia Agárdi & Dénes Pál, Gergő Rácz and ldikó Keresztes were put straight through by the expert jury, while the subsequent public vote completed the line-up of lucky winners: Tibor Gyurcsík, Tamás Palcsó and Gergő Baricz. All of which means there was no room for this rather special gem:

The last two shows to kick off on Saturday night were also the most important, given that they selected actual entries for ESC 2013. You can read all about the victories of Eyþór Ingi in Iceland and Gianluca Bezzina in Malta by following the links to our dedicated articles on each event.

And that was everything from another busy week of Eurovision activity! What will the week ahead bring? Well, a look at our Calendar shows that the next event is the first Latvian semi-final on Friday night, followed by the Norwegian and Finnish finals and further heats in Latvia, Sweden and Hungary on Saturday. But we also expect the occasional news item on internal selections and other bits and pieces during the week – so don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all the latest gossip!