The Swedish selection train continued rolling on through one of the more… interesting traditions of Melodifestivalen, andra chansen—I mean semifinal. For those unfamiliar with the format, Mello consists of 4 heats, each with 7 songs. In each heat, 2 songs go direct to the final, 2 go to the semifinal, and the rest are eliminated. The semifinal was originally meant to be a second chance for artists to tweak their performances. However, since every single artist just gave a carbon copy of their first performance, the festival organizers finally admitted defeat a few years ago and changed the name from the second chance round to the semifinal and got rid of the previous duel format that saw two songs going head-to-head.
Since then, SVT has struggled to figure out what exactly to do with week 5 of Melodifestivalen and this year was no exception.
The show started, as every week of Mello does, with performances of all the night’s songs. They were, as expected, identical to their first performances and there’s no point in recapping them when the others covering Mello have already done such a great job.
The interval acts kicked off with a relatively new tradition: inducting someone into the Melodifestivalen Hall of Fame. This week’s lucky recipient was Sweden’s answer to Kris Jenner: Pernilla Wahlgren. A short clip showed host Jesper Rönndahl visiting the singer at her home to deliver her trophy and try on piccadills.
Halfway through the voting, they brought out a screen to break down the results of the previous heats. I probably would’ve understood this better if I understood Swedish. Or math. At the end of the segment, they revealed the 4 songs that would go to the final, if the show were over.
But of course, this is week 5 of Mello. Nothing is ever that simple. They opened the second round of voting which concluded with one of the most confusing results sequences I’ve ever seen (and I can’t blame this one on my poor Swedish and math). Instead of showing the point allocations for the different age groups, they only gave out the 12 points for each age group. And there was no scoreboard. All of this led to a very anticlimactic final result, where Jesper just listed off the 4 winners who were, surprise surprise, the exact same 4 songs that led the first round of voting.
The one true highlight of the night was the interval act staged as a birthday surprise for legendary Swedish actor, designer, singer, and drag queen, Christer Lindarw. The act started with a drag queen popping out of a giant birthday cake to tell a fairy tale about Christer’s life and ended with him sitting on a peacock feather throne, surrounded by queens singing “La dolce vita.” My writing is not nearly good enough to capture the performance so just go watch it.
Oh, and one of the songwriters bit the host, Farah Abadi, during the voting.