Well it was certainly exciting if nothing else! And most definitely interesting!
Last night’s Andra Chansen round of Melodifestivalen took place, and we now have two more songs for next week’s grand final, meaning that we now know all ten songs which will be competing to win.
You can read here how the voting system was organised. Most people had tried to predict how the results would go, and most people (ourselves included) got it entirely wrong! In the end, Sara Varga managed to fend off three of the biggest fan favourites of the entire competition, Love Generation, Loreen, and Jenny Silver, to win the first half of the dueling system. So she has the considerable amount of fans of all three of those artists, and their fury to contend with today. But she can of course console herself with the fact that Sweden genuinely seem to really love her song, ‘Spring För Livet’. Was it our choice to go through? No, it wasn’t. But we’re still going to be more than happy to see it at Globen next weekend. It’s a fantastic song, and the one which incidentally, we woke up humming this morning. We would have much preferred to have seen Love Generation, Jenny Silver, or Loreen in the final, but we can comsole ourselves with the fact that a good song and a good artist got a place in the final.
We can’t really say the same for the second half of the duels though….
The biggest shock of the evening was when Linda Prtichard’s big ballad ‘Alive’ lost out to The Moniker’s ‘Oh My God’ in Duel 3. Many had thought that she was the obvious choice for making the final out of the four songs in the second half of the contest. And we suppose that it really was the ‘obvious’ choice too. But it’s not what Sweden went for. And in the end, they chose The Moniker to triumph over Pernilla Andersson (who had herself beaten Shirley’s Angels in Duel 4) also. Once again we found ourselves in the position of having our least preferred song win the dueling system and progress to the final, as we would have preferred to see Linda Pritchard, Shirley’s Angels and even Pernilla Andersson go through over him. Although unlike with ‘Spring För Livet’, we can’t take any consolation from ‘Oh My God’ being in the final. It just doesn’t appeal to us at all.
So there we have it! We were oh so surprised, since the Andra Chansen format has always been quite kind to the more schlager and pop songs and artists. But Sweden clearly want something a little different this year. And they’ve certainly got it in that final line-up, which we’ll examine tomorrow.
It was the first contest this year that we watched at home on SVT, rather than being in the arena for. And whilst we did try to just watch and absorb what was happening on TV, and not get distracted by what was happening on twitter, once we took one glance at twitter, it was impossible to get away from it then! So many people were discussing it, that at one point Sara Varga and Pernilla Andersson were trending topics WORLDWIDE!!! It was also on twitter that we first got wind of something of a voting scandal. For some of the duels, the incorrect numbers had apparently been shown under the incorrect names (this was only for the special numbers that donated to charity though, rather than the standard numbers). This then elevated from comment onto actual screen shots appearing online. Although shortly after the contest, SVT stated that they had examined voting figures and could confirm that the few votes made to the special charity donating phone numbers, weren’t considerable enough to have effected the final results, so even if they were cancelled, the result would be the same. So that scandal was put to bed quickly and quietly. You’ve got to love the drama though – even if you’re not too happy with the result!
