In normal circumstances I’d be putting up my full predictions of what might happen tonight, but my poor spreadsheet has crashed into the Eurovision iceberg and reckons that Comoros have got it sewn up, with St Kitts and Nevis likely to fight it out for last place in spite of only being one country.
Croatia’s looking it should be like the winner in reality. Most of the potential threats have melted away; Switzerland, France, Israel and wildcards Ireland and Armenia are likely to be in the race, and Olly Alexander, Marina and Gåte are all still winking down the camera and saying “Don’t write us off”.
At the other end, Austria and Germany aren’t making it clear why they’ll climb very high up the scoreboard – I think Germany pull ahead on limited jury love and possibly a zeitgeist-capturing staging.
It’s clearly not a normal year, but let’s squeeze the best things we can out of it. We will always have denim.
Get this
BREAKING – Slimane diverged from his planned performance this afternoon in the acapella section of the song to give a short speech. According to James Rowe on Twitter, he said “I dreamed about being a singer and to sing peace. Here every artist wants to sing about love, sing about peace. We need to be united by music.”
It remains to be seen whether there will be any consequences for that, though we see no obvious reason why there would be. If it happens tonight though, then there’ll be another piece of paper in Martin Osterdahl’s in-tray to go with all the others.