Hello again! I’m Steven Perkins, and this is Douze Points - the Eurovision podcast from the lovely people behind Bingewatch. We are with you every Monday, checking out the latest headlines and taking deep-ish dives into the fascinating history of the Eurovision Song Contest.

If you aren’t doing so already, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter at Bingewatch underscore Pod, where you can also tweet us any questions or comments - nothing too mean please, I’m very easily upset.

In a few minutes we’ll be taking a closer look at the Eurovision powerhouse that is Sweden, but first: what’s in the news?

The BBC has confirmed the performances we have in store for the semi finals. Semi Final 1 will open with a performance by host Julia Sanina, and will also feature Rita Ora performing a medley of her greatest hits and the world premiere of her new single, and Ukrainian singer Alyosha performing alongside Liverpool’s own Rebecca Ferguson.

Semi Final 2’s interval will see the return of Mariya Yaremchuk, she of the iconic hamster wheel from 2014, leading a montage of some of the most well-known pieces of Ukrainian music, and also a performance called Be Who You Wanna Be, led by three brilliant drag performers.

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We’ve also got some one-off specials to look forward to here in the UK in the run-up to Eurovision. Jason Manford and Chelcee Grimes will present Eurovision Calling: Jason and Chelcee’s Ultimate Guide, which will offer us 20 reasons why the Eurovision Song Contest is the greatest show on Earth. Only 20? Elsewhere, Fleur East is set to host Eurovision: Everyone’s A Winner, where she counts down the 20 Eurovision performers who didn’t win the contest but still went on to achieve great success in the music industry and beyond.

And for those of you planning to head to Liverpool itself to enjoy this year’s contest, the first details of the Eurovision Village have now been announced. Last year’s winners, Kalush Orchestra, will be headlining at the Eurovision Village, which opens on Friday 5 May and runs until the 13th, which will include live music, DJ sets, special guest appearances and a unique Discover Ukraine area.

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The list of acts who have won the Eurovision Song Contest more than once is not a long one: in fact, the only person currently on it is Johnny Logan, who won twice for Ireland - with ‘What’s Another Year’ in 1980 and ‘Hold Me Now’ in 1987 (and also won for a third time, but this time as a songwriter rather than a performer, for Linda Martin’s ‘Why Me?’ in 1992). But it looks extremely possible that we could be adding another name this year, as the current frontrunner to win Eurovision 2023 is Loreen, who of course already won for Sweden back in 2012.

So with that in mind, I wanted to take a little look at Sweden in the modern era of Eurovision and think about their track record - and what it might mean for this year’s contest.

Let’s travel back in time 11 years to Baku, Azerbaijan, where the contest was being held the year after Ell & Nikki won with ‘Running Scared’ (a track which I think is underrated by a lot of people, by the way). Sweden entered the contest with ‘Euphoria’ by Loreen, a song that was tipped to do very well, but was sharing the spotlight in the pre-contest publicity with ‘Party For Everybody’, the novelty song by Buranovskiye Babushki, a group of eight elderly women representing Russia whose performance involved them ‘baking bread’ on the stage.

To be honest, looking back at Eurovision 2012, it doesn’t feel like a particularly vintage year - very few of these songs have lingered in my head over the years, and most of the ones that did went out in the qualifying rounds - like ‘The Social Network Song’ by San Marino’s Valentina Monetta, and ‘Woki mit deim Popo’ by the immaculately named Trackshittaz from Austria. The rest of the songs rounding out the eventual top five with Sweden and Russia that year were pleasant, well-sung but fairly forgettable ballads from Serbia, Azerbaijan and Albania - so, not to take anything away from Sweden’s eventual victory, but it’s no surprise that their uplifting EDM floorfiller ran away with the title that year, receiving a total of 372 points. That was a whisker behind the record under the old scoring system set by Norway’s Alexander Rybak in 2009, with 387 points for Fairytale. But Loreen did manage to break the record for the number of 12s received, with 18 out of 41 countries giving them maximum points, and only Italy failing to give them anything at all.

Loreen’s win felt like a bit of a watershed moment for Eurovision - your mileage may vary of course, but it felt like the first time in a long time that the contest had been won by a majorly commercial pop song, and that was reflected in its chart performance, reaching number one in of course Sweden but also Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland, and Turkey. It only made it to number three in the UK, but when you factor in that it was the highest-charting non-UK Eurovision song in 25 years, that’s still pretty impressive.

Of course, Sweden had a long and storied Eurovision history before all this - you don’t need me to tell you about ABBA, right? - and enjoyed a particularly successful stint from 1983 to 1985, with a win sandwiched by a top three finish on either side - but I think a lot of Sweden’s reputation as a Eurovision powerhouse comes from its sheer consistency over the last decade or so, and it’s interesting to look at how we got here.

I’m sure you know this already, but just in case you don’t, Sweden’s Eurovision qualifying process is kind of hardcore. In its current form, Melodifestivalen - or Melfest, for short - runs for six weeks on Saturday nights on the national broadcaster SVT, and is usually hosted by a different city each week. There are four heats and in each heat two songs automatically qualify for the final, while the songs in third and fourth place go through to the semi-final - previously known as Andra chansen, or “second chance” - where they compete for the final four spots in the final. So 12 songs in total advance into the final, and the winner of the final goes to Eurovision. To give you a little bit of context as to just how huge Melfest is in Sweden, this year’s competition had an audience share of over 70% for every episode, and the final had a whopping 83% share. Melfest is a Big Deal, as you’d expect from a country with such a strong and proud tradition of pop music songwriting as Sweden - though for UK listeners, it’s probably quite hard to imagine, given that the last time we had a national final back in 2019, it was one episode long, aired on BBC2 on a Friday night and had an audience share of 6.4%.

So Melfest is big in Sweden - but it hasn’t always been this way. Just as the UK fell out of love with Eurovision for a long, long time, and only rediscovered our affection for it last year - coincidentally the same year that we got our best result in over two decades - Sweden had its own spell of not being all that bothered about Melfest. In the mid-90s, the competition went from pulling in audiences of nearly six million in Sweden to almost half that - and the introduction of a televoting system also caused problems, with some critics claiming that it was skewing the results - so, just like Eurovision itself would end up doing in the future, Melfest rolled back to a hybrid jury/televote set-up.

Back in the 90s, Melodifestivalen was only held on a single night, but in 2002, Christer Björkman - the winner of Melfest 1992 with ‘I morgon är en annen dag’, or ‘Tomorrow is another day’ - was appointed the show’s new producer, and set about modernising it in a bid to make the Swedish public fall in love with it again. His ideas were bold - he spun it out from a single night of TV into five weeks, adopting the heats structure for the first time, as well as adding the smaller Andra Chansen round (held on the Sunday after the final heat) for the songs that narrowly missed out on a finals spot. He also adopted the new strategy of having the contest tour the country - having previously only been held in either Stockholm, Malmö or Gothenberg, he took advantage of Sweden’s vast array of ice hockey arenas to spread the contest to other parts of the nation and get the Swedish people to fall in love with Melfest again - and it worked, with the viewing figures starting to tick upwards again, so much so that even the Second Chance round was eventually incorporated into the Saturday night slot as well in 2007, expanding the competition from five weeks to six.

Curiously, while the fate of Melfest was being decided in Sweden, the rest of the world might not have really noticed, as the decline in popularity of Melfest didn’t have a noticeable impact on Sweden’s overall performance at Eurovision. Like any country, they had their peaks and troughs, and after Carola won in 1991 with ‘Fångad av en stormwind’, they had two more top three finishes that decade and another win in 1999, with Charlotte Nilsson’s ‘Take Me To Your Heaven’ (coincidentally, the year that the rules were relaxed to allow countries to choose what language they entered in, so Charlotte had actually won Melfest with the Swedish language version, ‘Tusen och en natt’).

In the years following Charlotte’s win, though, Sweden racked up a decade of good, respectable but unspectacular results at Eurovision, until they hit their stride again in 2011, grabbing four top three finishes in the space of five years - firstly with Eric Saade’s ‘Popular’ using nominative determinism to snatch third place, then of course with Loreen winning in 2012, Sanna Nielsen finishing third in 2014 with ‘Undo’, and Måns Zelmerlöw winning again in 2015 with ‘Heroes’. There might not be a direct correlation, but it’s worth noting that Sweden’s rebirth at Eurovision came a few years after the rules were changed again in 2009 - where we switched back from a full televote system to having the results decided by a 50/50 split of jury and televotes. Which brings me to something else about Sweden’s track record that’s worth mentioning…

You might have heard Graham Norton saying on the UK commentary that ‘Sweden are so good at Eurovision’, because he says it most years, and he’s not wrong - but there is a small caveat we shouldn’t overlook, which is that they generally tend to rank higher with the juries than they do in the televote. It doesn’t happen every year - indeed, in 2016 and 2021, their televote score was actually slightly higher - but as a general rule, you can assume Sweden’s submission to Eurovision in any given year won’t strike quite as much of a chord with viewers at home as it does with juries. To get slightly more statistical about it, over the last 10 years, Sweden has averaged a fifth place finish with the juries and a 10th place finish with the voters at home, so there’s not a lot in it in most cases, but there have been one or two glaring outliers - like in 2018, when Benjamin Ingrosso finished second with the juries and 23rd in the televote. Just a few years earlier, only the most ardent Eurovision fans would have even noticed this - but since 2016, when the rules were changed so that the jury scores and televotes are both counted and announced separately, it has become a little more obvious to the average viewer.

So why might this be? Well, their popularity with the juries is most likely due to Sweden’s international reputation for high quality pop songwriting, and the fact that their selection process - ie Melfest - highlights the songwriters as well as the artists. While I don’t think they exactly need to be hitting panic stations right now that they don’t have quite such a reliably strong televote, because their reliable popularity with the juries tends to make up that shortfall most years, it is interesting that Melfest hasn’t produced a televote winner in the final at Eurovision since Loreen - and that Sweden’s best hope in years of topping the public vote comes from Loreen again. Clearly, when it comes to Eurovision, you might be able to anticipate the sort of thing that juries will like and respond to - but the general public are a different beast entirely, and Sweden is as vulnerable to that as the rest of us.

So, if there’s any lesson at all to take away from this, I guess it’s that you underestimate Sweden at your peril - but at the same time, they do have a weak point which means they’re not invincible. And looking at this year’s contest, the momentum is definitely behind Loreen, whose song is already a huge international hit - and while I think the smart money is still on her to win, I also think we can’t entirely rule out an upset, particularly with the likes of Norway’s Alessandra, Finland’s Käärijä, Spain’s Blanca Paloma and Austria’s Teya and Salena going down a storm at the pre-contest parties. I think it’s Loreen’s to lose - but I also think we’ve got a real competition on our hands.

One last thing to end on - if Loreen does win this year, then Sweden will draw level with Ireland for the highest number of overall Eurovision wins with seven apiece. Given Sweden’s current track record in comparison with Ireland, we’d probably only have to wait another six or seven years for them to pull into the lead. Interestingly, four countries are currently close behind both of them on five wins each - France, the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Luxembourg, but out of these four, only the Netherlands have managed a win this century - the UK last won in 1997, France last won in 1977 (although they narrowly lost to Sweden in a tie break in 1991), and Luxembourg hasn’t even taken part since 1993…

That’s it for this week. I’ll be back with another minisode of headlines next Monday, and I’m also off to the official launch of this year’s contest in Liverpool later this week - so hopefully I’ll have a lot to talk about.

Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button to make sure you don’t miss an update, and until next time: good night Europe, and good morning Australia…