Happy middle weekend, everyone! It’s fair zooming by, isn’t it?

Having made it through my flight to Gran Canaria despite the best efforts of British tourists being, well, British tourists, I’m back to cast my eye over what else happened while I was mid-air – namely the publication of the rehearsal video clips of this year’s six automatic finalists.

By this time next week, we’ll know the identity of the winner of ESC 2025. Is there any chance it’ll be one of the “big five” or the home country?

We already knew we wouldn’t be travelling to Germany next year – “Baller” is an entry with lots to admire, but not an especially competitive one. Like last year, Germany is probably mainly playing for jury respect here, so how do you stage a song like this to be credible enough to appeal to jurors? Tynna standing on top of a giant boombox is a striking image and one that sets the tone for the song nicely, but we’ll need to see how the rest of the performance develops to really get an impression. If the audience reaction (in both sound and visuals) can be incorporated in a way that adds to the clubby atmosphere, I feel like that would be helpful.

A back-to-back victory for Switzerland is theoretically more possible, considering it looks like Zoë Më’s “Voyage” is setting a unique mood here. I’d exercise one note of caution, though: the clip comes from the very start of the performance, and so far I haven’t been hugely convinced by her vocals later in the song. If they go off the rails, it could quickly puncture that mood again. As it stands, we haven’t really learned much here other than “it’s going to be arty”, and, well, we kind of knew that already. It’ll be fun to see just how arty, though.

Need a million in one, two, three

“The United Kingdom are taking a risk with their entry” is a phrase it’s rare to hear, so that’s already a positive. Remember Monday are excellent vocalists so there was never any doubt on that front; the question was merely whether the staging for “What The Hell Just Happened?” would help to deliver the risky part of the entry, namely the song itself. It’s a knowingly disjointed number and it needs the girls to really act the part and hit every single camera angle in order to bring the “morning after a big night” fun across to the audience – by which I mean the audience down the camera lens, which can be the tricky aspect for singers who are more used to West End stages (see Lucie Jones’ facial contortions for details). I think they’re doing that based on what we saw yesterday, but it’s hard to tell whether they’ll stay on it for the whole three minutes. We also heard hints of some vocal runs that differ from the studio version, so that’s something to watch out for too…

We are not going to Spain next year. (Well, I probably will be, but for a sunshine holiday rather than for ESC.) They appear to have thrown not one but several kitchen sinks at the performance for “Esa diva”, and as well as coming across as somewhat cheap and tacky, I’m concerned that it makes Melody look really quite desperate. If nothing else, it just doesn’t seem very fun. Oh well.

Italy is playing at being Italy rather than playing at Eurovision, and that’s fine – it’s what they do. Full confession: “Volevo essere un duro” is my favourite song this year (by far), so I was naturally concerned about reports that they’ve added subtitles to the entire performance. And yeah… I don’t think it really works. I absolutely understand why Lucio wants to communicate his message as widely as possible – as a soft boy from a hard town, the lyrics are one of the reasons the song resonates with me so much – and thankfully the quality of the translation seems to be OK, but overall I fear it’s just a distraction. Everything else about the performance is broadly right, at least: setting a sepia-tinged 1970s mood for this Bowie pastiche is the correct decision, and the whole thing certainly stands out from the rest of the competition both musically and mood-wise. I just keep coming back to those subtitles…

Small-town boy in a big arcade

And finally, perhaps the biggest contender for victory among the automatic finalists: France. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not that fond of “Maman” as a song myself, and seeing them win with it after stronger entries like “Mon amour” and “Voilà” would feel a bit like Yugoslavia finally getting the victory with “Rock Me” in 1989 – but in the same way as that, it would be an obvious reward after a good run of entries, and hard to argue against in a field where not that many songs feel like they’re playing for victory. Louane and her team definitely are, and we’ve known that since the first rehearsal photos. The sand vortex that official blogger Heidi described a few days ago is ridiculously effective, and Louane clearly knows how to work the cameras. Would you be totally surprised to see this run away with the jury vote and establish a near-insurmountable lead? I wouldn’t…

So there we are, dear readers – we’ve seen rehearsal footage of all 37 of this year’s competing entries, and while I personally think it’s a really entertaining bunch and some of the stagings look like they’re going to be great, I’m not really any the wiser as to how the scoreboard is going to look by the end of Saturday night. Which, let’s be honest, is a good thing! Now it’s time to take a breather before the dress rehearsals begin tomorrow and we dive into the blog reports from the various fan sites fortunate enough to have accreditation access. We look forward to overthinking all of that, too. Bring it on!