And we are off …
✨✨✨ Someone presses the button to make fire appear on stage! ✨✨✨
1: 🇳🇴 Norway – Kyle Alessandro with 'Lighter'
There is more than one entry this year that seems to have listened to Olly Alexander’s Dizzy from last year, saw that it achieved very little in terms of points, and then decided “We’ll have ourselves a bit of that for 2025” regardless. On the recorded version the vocals are autotuned to the point of setting my teeth on edge because I’m an old-fashioned soul, so it has been interesting to see how Kyle Alessandro performs in the arena. He is no stranger to television, having competed in Norway’s Got Talent at the age of ten. They often pick an uptempo number to open the show and get the arena on its feet.
I’m not saying I am old-fashioned, but the flag parade was added in 2013, and I still consider it an unwelcome innovation. Possibly I am just scarred from live blogging Olympic opening ceremonies. At least there are only 26 finalists so it won’t last an hour. Swiss legends Yello are providing the soundtrack with The Race.
We are starting with Nemo reprising last year’s winner, The Code, which is in, IMHO, an all-time Eurovision banger. And they are looking fabulous.
I am just going to tip you off that I think there is about 18 minutes of preamble until we get to the first song.
Let the Eurovision Song Contest begin …
Hello! The 69th Eurovision song contest is beginning in Basel.
I am here to be your second-screen companion with some extra facts, jokes, pictures, witty observations, 80’s pop references, and moaning that Milkshake Man didn’t qualify. Here’s the deal …
Who is presenting tonight? Hazel Brugger, Sandra Studer and Michelle Hunziker. Find out more here
How does voting work at Eurovision 2025? I’ve got you covered with this explainer
What should be on your bingo card? Here are my suggestions
How does this live blog work? It is essentially just me chatting along with Eurovision while hosting a small family watch party and drinking too much prosecco
Why is Australia’s Milkshake Man not going to be on? Because life is unfair
The ones that got away: 🇦🇺 Australia and 🇮🇪 Ireland
Every year there are a couple of songs I think are absolute bangers which will make the final more fun but then inexplicably get binned off in the semi-finals when the whole of Europe fails to agree with me. Booooooooo! This year, those honours belong to Australia and Ireland.
Ireland’s entry was Laika Party by Emmy. Fun Laika fact: she was a stray dog picked up off the streets and hurtled into space by the Soviet Union, the first dog in space. Less fun Laika fact: she overheated and died during the flight 🐾
So it did seem like an odd choice of subject matter for an uplifting club number, but Emmy was imagining what if she survived and was still having a party in the sky. Rather than being horribly killed in what, at that point, was essentially an experiment in weapon technology.
Anyway, put that aside, Emmy was also wearing an incredible sixties-style bacofoil space dress that needed another outing.
Here is the real Laika by the way, bless her little paws.
Meanwhile – HOW IS MILKSHAKE MAN NOT IN THE FINAL? My Australian brothers and sisters, this has been a travesty, and I apologise on Europe’s behalf. If you haven’t been following the build up to the contest, please devote three minutes to watching this video and wondering what could have been …
I spoke to Ewan Spence of ESC Insight, a website and podcast that covers Eurovision all year round, to see what he thought the chances might be for the UK entry, Remember Monday. He wasn’t that optimistic, suggesting that he saw a pretty low ceiling for them.
I think, with a bit of luck, we could get between tenth and fifteenth on the jury with a really good following wind. The team will be looking at 30-50 points from the jury, and then anything from 25 down to zero from the televote. I’d love to see them break 100 points, but I don’t think it will.
The problem the song has is the tempo breaks. Every time it comes up to the payoff lyric, it slams the anchors on, and brings the tempo right back to zero. Then it has to build it up again.
So the song feels like it stops four times, and it feels like it’s stopping right at the point where you’re about to sell it, finally, to the audience. I don’t think it works competitively on the first listen.
Here are some of the pictures of fans gathered in Basel for tonight’s show …
Occasionally I see people on social media say this blog has been a bit sneery about the contest, which I find hilarious, as I absolutely 100% unashamedly love Eurovision and doing this coverage is always one of the highlights of my year.
But I did put my “negative Nancy” hat on earlier this week – see several Is Doctor Who really dead this time? articles passim – expressing my concerns that the increased demand for social media content from Eurovision artists is forcing countries to choose blander options who can better trusted not to go off-piste or exposed as a one trick pony during the lengthy campaigning season.
You can read that right old moan-up here – but it does have some great videos embedded in it so is worth scrolling through for Go_A’s deadpan cover of fellow Ukrainian Eurovision legendary entry Verka Serduchka’s Dancing Lasha Tumbai alone.
One thing I always find invaluable, and you might enjoy reading too, is the ESC Insight Eurovision guidebook, which is aimed at fans and media commentators and is full of interesting things about the acts and the songs. This year it has been put together by Samantha Ross, and you can find a free downloadable pdf of it here.
Talking of our hosts, long term Eurovision watchers will know that the skits and intervals can veer between joyful camp fun and excruciating awkwardness. A bit like a night out with me, I guess. We got some of both during the semi-finals. If you fancy something to get you in the mood, the first semi-final featured this musical number, Made In Switzerland, which was definitely fun, and had a little bit of political bite in some of the lyrics along the way …
Who is hosting the contest tonight?
Thanks to Nemo’s victory last year, this is Switzerland’s third crack at hosting Eurovision, having hosted the inaugural event in Lugano in 1956 and then hosted in Lausanne in 1989 after perennial trivia question answer Céline Dion won for the country the year before.
Tonight we are in Basel, and we have three co-hosts. If you watched the semi-finals you will already be familiar with Hazel Brugger and Sandra Studer.
Performing under the stage name Sandra Simó, Studer was Switzerland’s entry in 1991 with Canzone Per Te, with a hairdo that is giving me flashbacks to what everybody looked like when I was taking my A-levels, and a chorus weirdly reminiscent of the Blake’s 7 theme tune.
Brugger is a US-Swiss comedian and television presenter, who has already given us some incredibly weird and memorable moments during the semi-finals, including crowd-surfing, and showing off her weird tongue trick to Estonia’s Tommy Cash in an interview that made him look like the normal one. She has been like a ball of unpredictable chaotic energy running through the show so far, and I am 100% here for it.
Television presenter and model Michelle Hunziker will be joining them tonight.
Earlier this week Angelica Frey ran her rule over this year’s entries and picked her top ten. She wrote it before the semi-finals so worth noting that, while we do not see eye to eye on Spain’s entry, I approve of the fact that her top ten included at least one song that has fallen at the first hurdle which I think deserved a place tonight.
Your Eurovision 2025 bingo card suggestions!
No Eurovision live blog is complete without some bingo card suggestions. Of course, if you want to have a shot of drink each time you spot one of these things, you are welcome, but drinking is not compulsory. Instead you can just shout out “What the hell just happened?” or “Serving kant!” or whatever floats your particular boat. But not “When I say, ‘Sweet, sweet’, you say, ‘Yum, yum’” because that did not qualify. *shakes fist at sky again*
Here are my suggestions …
✨✨✨ Costume change! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Performance designed to look great on TV looks terrible in the hall! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Unexpected French language in the bagging area! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ An artist’s dog appears! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Man plays three instruments in one song, but one of the instruments is rubbish ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ A painfully high note is delivered! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Abrupt genre change! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Someone presses the button to make fire appear on stage! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Twelve points from Cyprus to Greece! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Oversized instruments! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ A bald man joins in halfway through and ruins a song! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ You’re live blogger makes a typo! [THAT’S THE JOKE] ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Cynical “uplifting” key change near the end! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ The wind machine is activated! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Guitar shreddage! 🎸 ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Inexplicable mask! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ The boys are bare-chested again! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ An overlong pause delivering the “Douze points” when we are already running behind! ✨✨✨
✨✨✨ Sophie Ellis-Bexter klaxon ✨✨✨
Just to clue you in on how tonight is going to run. I’m not in Basel, I think it would be far too tricky, for me at least, to do the live blog actually from inside the arena. Plus nobody at the Guardian wanted to pay for me to go. Boooooooo!
I’m in London, and I will be watching Eurovision on the television while hosting a small family watch party. I will also desperately be trying not to make the same jokes as Graham Norton on the BBC’s coverage.
With me are my younger sister, who is a huge Eurovision fan, but also a massive spoilerphobe, so she has heard NONE of this year’s songs yet, so I am looking forward to seeing her reactions. Her son, who studies performing arts, is here too, as are my two kids, who are 12 and 15 and have been shamelessly indoctrinated into all things Eurovision since birth. I’ve printed out our own bingo and scorecards already.
But the most important component is YOU, the reader. I hope to add a little extra sparkle to your evening, and do feel free to email me your thoughts to martin.belam@theguardian.com as we go along, and I might feature some of them in the blog. Pictures of pets watching the show are always appreciated. If you put EUROVISION as the subject line that would be a great help, thank you.
One of the other controversies in the buildup to tonight’s grand final has been the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) decision to allow Israel to participate, despite calls for them to be excluded.
I’m going to do what I did last year, and follow the same procedure I do when covering events like the Olympics – once the organising bodies have made their decision about who can participate, we cover the event as is, so we’ll treat Yuval Raphael and Israel’s song and staging like any other entry tonight.
As I said last year, I am aware that some Guardian readers and regular Eurovision live blog followers will be glad to keep the music and the politics separate – but I am also aware that some of you will find that disappointing, and think it is the wrong decision.
You can find all of the Guardian’s ongoing coverage of the Israel-Gaza war here.
If you have been following the buildup to this year’s contest you will not have been able to avoid the controversy over whether Malta’s Miriana Conte was allowed to sing the words “serving kant” or not. Spoilers: she is not. Our European culture editor Philip Oltermann had this look at the history of smutty numbers on the Eurovision stage.
A couple of years ago the people on our culture desk forced Alexis Petridis to rank every single winner up to that point – all 69 of them because of the weird four-way tie that happened once.
It doesn’t include the last two winners. I imagine Loreen’s Tattoo might have nestled somewhere in the 20s, and that last year’s winner, The Code by Nemo, would have been in the top ten.
How does voting work at Eurovision 2025?
Are you new to Eurovision? Probably not if you are already reading my live blog. But here is the lowdown on how the voting works tonight.
Every competing country in the contest – that is all 37 who initially entered, not just those appearing in the final – have both a jury awarding votes, and a public telephone vote. There is also an additional “rest of the world” aggregated telephone vote.
Once voting closes, each country reveals who has received a maximum 12 points from their country’s jury. Points are awarded as follows: 12, 10, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
This is the bit where we go from country to country and everybody says “Great show, Basel, you really blew our minds” and then takes far too long to deliver the actual score, causing the show to inevitably run behind schedule.
After that procedure, we then get the public vote added to each song one by one, starting with the song placed last by the juries. That usually builds up to a tight climax where three or four songs leapfrog into the lead and then there is some suspense … and then Sweden almost certainly wins (probably).
Salut! Hello! Hallå! Привіт! ¡Hola! Ahoj! Γειά σου!
Bonsoir et bienvenue à la couverture en direct du 69e Eurovision par le Guardian.
That is about as much French as I can manage which may be a little tricky tonight as Switzerland is sure to serve up some multi-lingual hosting this evening.
There is going to be a lot to enjoy tonight, even if a couple of the things I really liked got knocked out at the semi-final stage *shakes fist at sky*. More on that later.
It is Martin Belam here with you tonight. It is the fourth time I’ve done it now, and I’ve possibly got the hang of it, although the chaotic third act of me trying to live blog the results coming in when I’ve had too much prosecco is surely going to reappear.
The show starts at 9pm CEST, 8pm BST, and I will be with you every step of the way as your second-screen guide. You can get in touch with me at martin.belam@theguardian.com – and if you put EUROVISION as the subject line your email will be easier to find.
