Sometimes a country gets in a bit of a rut and sends the same kind of thing to Eurovision year after year. We can all think of examples from the fields of French chanson, Greek ethnopop and so on. Sometimes, though, you get back-to-back entries from a country that could hardly be more different. Enter Poland. Last year, the frankly shameless performance by Cleo and her backing girls on My Słowianie – We Are Slavic split the voting audience in two (televoters loved it, juries hated it), but the overall outcome was a positive one: the much-needed confidence boost of a first qualification for the grand final since 2008, a reasonable showing on the scoreboard, and a whole load of attention and GIF-based memes across social media.

Rather than try to repeat the formula with something similarly trashy, this year Poland are sending Monika Kuszyńska into battle. ESC fans with longer memories will be familiar with Monika as the singer of Varius Manx, who rocked the 2003 Polish final with the song Sonny. Since then, she was involved in a serious traffic accident and is now wheelchair-bound – leading some to suggest that ESC 2015 could end up being something of a “disability-off” between Monika and the Finnish punks PKN.

While that might be taking the narrative a bit far, the video for the Polish entry, In The Name Of Love, certainly does nothing to hide Monika’s tragedy-and-recovery storyline. It’s very much the visual theme of the clip, and the big reveal of Monika sitting in her wheelchair is saved until the last few seconds. One assumes they won’t be trying to recreate this “shock factor” on stage in Vienna, but maybe the producers know something we don’t and that’s why Poland have been placed last in the running order…?

Of course, we’ve encountered the song title In The Name Of Love in a Eurovision context before: it was the name of the English-language version of Marlain’s ill-fated Cypriot entry in 1999. Monika’s 2015 namesake shares the fact that it starts off as a ballad, but mercifully it also stays as a ballad, too – and a seriously classy one that very deliberately turns its back on Eurovision clichés of build-and-release in favour of a more subtle approach. (It’s also hard to imagine Monika busting out Marlain’s chest glitter, although that would be fun.)

My verdict is a cautiously positive one. I’m quite surprised to find myself giving this the yellow light for a top ten finish, since nobody seems to give the song much of a prayer beyond possibly sneaking into the final. The more I think about it, though, the more it makes sense. Just because our beloved contest bestows high finishing positions on bearded ladies and biscuit-baking babushki doesn’t mean there isn’t also a jury and televoting audience for classy songs performed classily. And this has the potential to be the classiest of this year’s bunch. It got a bit of a collective shoulder-shrug when it was first revealed, mainly because it was yet another ballad in a year that’s hardly short of them – but the points won’t be handed out with that context in mind, and as an overall package, I can certainly see this particular ballad repeating last year’s result for Poland. Just don’t expect there to be as many GIFs this time round.

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