It’s hard to believe it, but it’s true: we’ve reached the end of another national final season. And for once, Sweden wasn’t the last country to select its entry – but more about that later.

Saturday night saw what has become a frequent occurrence, namely the schedule clash between the final of Sweden’s Melodifestivalen and Norway‘s Melodi Grand Prix. In a bid to hook viewers at home and abroad (well, maybe), Norway started five minutes earlier than its Nordic neighbour. Having abandoned the multi-week format a few years ago, this was a one-night affair, albeit one with multiple rounds of voting. There were some performances that will live long in the memory for all the right and wrong reasons – while we’re here, can we please just take a moment to admire Ida Maria’s baffling performance and vocal butchery of “Scandilove”?

In the end, the head-to-head superfinal came down to the two pre-show favourites and, if we’re being honest, the two most professional packages on the night: “Who We Are” by Rebecca and “That’s How You Write A Song” by Alexander Rybak, returning to the contest as a performer for the first time since his landslide victory at ESC 2009 in Moscow. While his 2018 effort is – inevitably – not a patch on “Fairytale”, it was enough to win over the Norwegian public, who duly decided to send him to the other end of the continent to defend their nation’s colours in Lisbon in May.

Regardless of what you might think of Rybak as a person and a performer – and while his cheesiness tends to grate on ESC fanboys, the general public are unlikely to be put off in the same way – it’s hard not to be irritated by the lyrics to “That’s How You Write A Song”, which seem to do everything but tell us how to, well, actually write a song. While it’s true that nobody really watches the Eurovision Song Contest for the lyrics, you can’t help but feel this is something of a missed opportunity to actually do something quite clever. Nevertheless, Rybak’s stage game is always strong, and this time it comes with added visual trickery. See what you think of his Saturday night performance here:

The weekend also saw Felix and Martin, your trusty escgo! editors and writers, taking a trip to Stockholm to drink in the Melodifestivalen mania. No accreditation or live tickets for us this year, just a quest to find our “Party Voice” on the dancefloor. Drinks served out of glitterballs helped a lot:

The selection process in Sweden has come in for unprecedented levels of criticism this year, not only from ESC fans around the world but from Swedish press commentators and the general public. Their sights have been targeted on everything from the perceived low song quality and the flaws of the “heart voting” app to the hosting skills of David Lindgren and his glitter-obsessed sidekick “Fab” Freddie – not to mention the international juries, whom Swedish schlager industry legend Bert Karlsson called “just a bunch of nerds”. How rude! Still, for all Sweden and the team around Christer Björkman have set a high bar for themselves and it’s not always going to be possible to reach the same standard, either song-wise or in terms of slickness of presentation, 2018 did feel like a “tired” year for Melodifestivalen and the format could probably use a bit of a refresh.

That all being said, the battle for the top position on Saturday night came down to two entries with the undoubted potential to deliver yet another placing in the top left-hand corner of the scoreboard for Sweden: “Every Single Day” by Felix Sandman (or, as per the Bidragsbibeln, “FELIX SANDMAN”) and Benjamin Ingrosso‘s “Dance You Off”. The latter was the bookmakers’ favourite going into the show, and Benjamin duly took home the trophy and the ticket to ESC as the clear favourite of the international juries and the narrow winner with the Swedish public – although it’s hard to judge just how narrow his victory was when the public vote is substantially flattened by the nature of the app vote. Still, that’s a discussion for another year. In the meantime, Ingrosso will surely follow Alexander Rybak in progressing from the rather weak-looking second ESC semi-final on Thursday 10 May and get the chance to defend the Swedish colours in the grand final in Lisbon.

Perhaps the most pleasing thing about Ingrosso’s win is his family heritage. He’s the son of Pernilla Wahlgren, a bit of a schlager/pop icon in her own right, although her business empire is all-encompassing these days:

Wahlgren probably should have represented Sweden when they hosted the contest in Gothenburg in 1985, but her legendary scream in the middle of “Piccadilly Circus” (below) wasn’t enough to win the favour of the juries. There’s even a decent case for suggesting that “Let Your Spirit Fly”, her duet with Jan Johansen from Melodifestivalen 2003, could have done some scoreboard business at ESC proper – although Sweden hardly did badly in either of those years. Regardless, we hope Pernilla will come along to Lisbon as part of the Swedish delegation, dance on the tables at Euroclub and shatter a few glasses with that scream once again.

Completing the weekend’s live action, the preselection marathon in Lithuania came to an end with a final consisting of just six songs, which almost seems a bit of a shame given how many others were cast aside in the process. In a combined jury and public vote, it was Ieva Zasimauskaitė who triumphed in the end with her song “When We’re Old”. A quiet and reflective song, the winning reprise was sung fully in Lithuanian and raises the question of whether the entry could be changed into its national language in time for ESC proper, much like Aliona Moon did for Moldova in 2013. Either way, the song has the honour of being the last publicly selected entry for the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest – congratulations!

Image sources: SVT, NRK, LRT