Melodifestival 2011 – Part I – The Bad, The Terrible and the Truly Horrific

Last night it began. The long and arduous path to Eurovision 2011. I agonized for about five minutes about whether or not to watch this show for the sake of this blog. It was a momentous decision, considering I had outsourced all Eurovision watching responsibility to the Swedish Godmother of my children.

As I've said before in the blog, Melodifestival/Eurovision remains one of those true mysteries of Swedish culture for the non-European (by this I mean 'me')

But we had some guests and we all decided we would make a night of it. We had our box of wine at the ready. And then – el scandelo! Right at the moment the contest was to begin – our cable went out. (Or, I suspect, the Swede pulled the chord out of the wall and announced 'Sorry, no TV tonight).

Surprisingly, we managed to find other things to do with ourselves. And thanks to the wonderful world of the internets we were able to go in afterwards and watch the big winners and losers of the night online. And thankfully, we didn't need to watch the entire clips. I think this will be what I will do for future Melodifestival events.

So how did the Swedes vote? Oddly, I think. They changed the voting system yet again this year. But I won't get into the rules here yet.

The surprising part was that I usually imagine the Melodifestival demographic is the 8-16 set and the 55-80 set. But the winners this year don't necessarily reflect this.

First place went to this blast from the Backstreet Boys cutting room floor:

  - OK so they seem to have taken this one down from Youtube - I will post if I find it again - the good news is, you will have a chance to see it again at the finals!

Second place went to the always wonderful musical category Swedish rap:

Sadly, this song, which we felt was all about passing gas, did not make it further:

And we didn't make it past looking at this last placed entry for more than 20 seconds:

Will any of these fabulous songs make it to Eurovision? Will Sweden even qualify for Eurovision this year? Oh the drama and excitement - and we will have to wait until May to find out!