The national final season is rushing towards its conclusion – can you believe it’s already March?! – so before you lose track of everything that’s been happening, here’s esc-chat.com’s handy weekly round-up!

Monday began with the least surprising news of the year so far, as German broadcaster NDR confirmed that Cascada’s “Glorious” will not be disqualified on account of the accusations of plagiarism from Loreen’s “Euphoria”. Equally unsurprising was the continued grinding of the British rumour mill: this time it was blog The Kickdrum claiming that the UK’s entry in Malmö will be a “power ballad” by an unexpected female soloist. Which doesn’t really narrow things down a great deal. Unfortunately, this track from 80-year-old Petula Clark doesn’t qualify as a power ballad, though it certainly fits the “unexpected” criterion in many ways:

It was a week for legal teams to earn their corn, apparently, as Tuesday saw the EBU confirming that Anouk would not be disqualified for having sung a few lines of her Dutch entry “Birds” down a phone line in 2011 (or something like that). This might seem like a fairly low-level thing for the EBU to have to get involved with, but at least it reflects their new, more sensible policy on what constitutes beneficial pre-deadline “promotion” for an entry.

It was a week for children, too: the team behind Ryan Dolan’s “Only Love Survives” announced that the preview video for the song would feature children from every one of the countries in Ireland’s semi-final – which arguably gives some indication as to the extent of their ambitions this year. Meanwhile, local press in the Malmö region reported that pupils from the Heleneholm school will be learning all 39 of the entries for ESC 2013 and will perform the winning song once the voting has concluded on May 18th. Maybe they know something we don’t about how long it’ll take the artists to get from the green room to the stage – is the former going to be in Copenhagen?!

In the evening, it was time for the Spanish final, with El Sueño de Morfeo performing all three entries. In line with many fan predictions, “Contigo hasta el final” took the victory and will represent the Iberian nation at ESC 2013. Tuesday night also saw the first of three semi-finals in Israel, with the jury and the televoters selecting Shani Zamir, Ron Weinreich and Kathleen Reiter for the grand final.

Song presentations were the order of the day on Wednesday. Two entries we’d heard a bit of previously – Georgia and Croatia – were revealed in full (and the Croatian performers turned out to be called Klapa s Mora – apparently “Super Klapa” was just a description. Boo!).

The evening then saw a presentation show on Macedonian TV revealing Esma & Lozano’s entry for ESC 2013, “Imperija”. Things seemed to be going well at first – the initial fan response to the song was broadly positive, and the Balkan nation’s chances of a good result in May were considered to be high in spite of them being in a semi-final with very few of their usual voting allies. Then the trouble began: as the week progressed, there was huge local criticism of the video, which comes across as a near-propaganda vehicle for the controversial government-backed “Skopje 2014” development project in the Macedonian capital. (There were Greek complaints about the nationalistic nature of the lyrics, too, but then there are always Greek complaints about something.) The state of play by the end of the week was that the video will be reworked and changes will be made to the arrangement, with Lozano threatening to quit the project otherwise. They should just take inspiration from this quick-witted YouTube genius and submit this to the EBU instead:

Meanwhile, in Israel, Ron Sandler, Moran Mazuz and Vladi Bleiberg qualified from the second semi-final – followed by Meital De Razon & Asi Tal, Hila Ben David and Moran Mazor from the third semi-final on Thursday night. Moran Mazor received an impressive average score of 8.5 out of 10 from the #esc chat vote – making hers easily one of the best-rated entries of the entire national final season.

Also on Thursday came the news that the Russian entry, “What If”, was being reworked by its composers and arrangers – whether this was in response to last week’s plagiarism accusations or the generally underwhelming response to the song is unclear. There was a further lack of clarity later in the day as Twitter buzzed with the rumour that the BBC had announced Kimberly Walsh (of Girls Aloud fame/infamy) as the UK’s entrant for ESC 2013 before quickly deleting the offending tweet. Was there any truth in the rumour? Did the tweet ever actually exist? And if so – and we rather like this idea – are the BBC deliberately winding up the desperate fanboys now?

On Friday, it was announced that SVT and reference group big shot Christer Björkman is keen on the idea of introducing pre-recorded backing vocals at ESC in the same way has been standard practice at Melodifestivalen for the last few years. The resulting fan outcry was predictable but largely understandable – what works at a national level shouldn’t automatically be assumed to be the right thing internationally. Still, it would be the logical next step after doing away with the random running order draw, so watch this space…

With no national final events taking place on Friday night, we considered starting a rumour that Welsh-language broadcaster S4C’s annual song festival, Cân i Gymru – being held in its usual slot on March 1st, St. David’s Day – was going to be used as the selection show for the UK’s 2013 Eurovision entry. It’s about time for a British minority language to feature at ESC, after all – and would the winning entry (below) really be any worse than another Josh or Engelbert?

Saturday was an incredibly busy day in Eurovision world – and a long one, too, with the Armenian final kicking things off early in the evening. You can read our report on the unexpected success of Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi here – as well as our recaps of what happened in the national finals of Estonia and Hungary.

Elsewhere, Serbia reduced its fifteen semi-finalists to five finalists with very little fuss – in stark contrast to the typical brashness and loudness of the Andra Chansen round in Sweden’s Melodifestivalen. A change in the format this year meant that the legendary duels didn’t take place until the very final round of voting, leading to far less in the way of suspense and fewer options for tactical televoting – now what’s the point of that? As much as anything, it made it fairly straightforward for the teenpop of Anton Ewald (“Begging”) and Robin Stjernberg (“You”) to qualify for the grand final in the Friends Arena – while the failure of Tone Damli (5th), Caroline af Ugglas (6th) and Cookies ‘N’ Beans (7th) to persuade the televoters ensured that Louise Hoffsten will be the only female in the line-up. Caroline wasn’t too bothered, though.

The week finished with Sunday, as it usually does, and eventful finals in Bulgaria and Serbia – click the links to read our full reports on the controversy and the interminable interval acts. Many people were confused by the “angel, devil and random girl dressed in gold” outfits of the Serbian winners, Moje 3. We think we’ve got it sussed, though – they’re styling themselves after the 1842-1848 flag of the Dominican Republic in a long overdue protest against colonisation and inequality within the sugarcane trade.

Also on Sunday was the “final chance” round in Israel, which flew so far under the radar that we forgot to include it in our event sidebars – oops! In any case, it was Judah Gavra who beat off the competition from Yarden Tzur and Niki Goldstein to capture the last ticket for Thursday’s grand final.

And that was the week in Eurovision! After all that activity, our Participant List for ESC 2013 is starting to fill up nicely – and the list of forthcoming events in our Calendar is starting to look comparatively bare. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of exciting action still to come between now and the Head of Delegation meeting on March 18th – so stay tuned to esc-chat.com and the #esc chatroom for all the news and gossip!