Robertson's Reflection
This week brings my annual attempt to be a producer of a show in my own right as I bring back TäbyMelodifestivalen. In my teaching day job the company of schools I work for holds a Eurovision competition between the different school’s each year. There is a catch to this in that the songs do not have to be original, but instead the harder and for many more scary proposition arises that you have to perform in one of the foreign languages of French, German, Spanish or Chinese.
My role here is that, I guess, of Executive Supervisor (I like my big titles). I’m in charge of finding the artists, picking the running order, writing the script, running the rehearsals and producing what is the biggest entertainment show that our school puts on. I put extra pressure on myself by inviting some extra special guests to sit on our jury. Alongside Insight’s travel expert Alison Wren was Julia Kedhammar, Sweden’s entrant to Junior Eurovision last year, who performed her winning Lilla Melodifestivalen song in the interval act complete with her four dancers. Even more important arguably was the appearance of Tine Matulessy, a Junior Eurovision Reference Group member for Sweden and the Head of Delegation for all things Junior. Certainly somebody I wanted to impress.
The show was a massive success, and as a producer when your principal describes the show as ‘slick’ you know you have done alright. For the second year in a row the songs drawn last and second last qualified to the Final round, meaning I need to really think about running order bias more, but I do love the acts we selected. In second place is a boy after my own heart called Florian who performs this comical German language song which had the audience in stitches.
The winner was something we’ve been working on for a year. One year ago Rebecca finished 2nd in the school competition and did great, however I was mesmerised by her brilliant voice. I knew exactly the song that would show it off and I will admit when she was performing I completely fanboyed. She made ‘Quedate Conmigo’ her own and I now love the song one hundred times more than I did in Baku. Her performance was breathtaking for somebody who is just thirteen. We’ve worked hard on it but it’s such a pleasure to see her do well. I think Tine was impressed, and another one of the interval acts also caught her eye and it would be amazing if something comes of that in the future.
There is something so fantastic about the culture we’ve created with our school contest that takes it so seriously yet is incredibly self-depreciating. We start the show with a dance-off between me and a child in a Fox costume (that was last year’s winner) which is as ridiculous as it sounds, but then with the crowd warmed up we break into song 1, a piano ballad (I had no choice, I had all ballads and I sympathise with ORF's production team!), you could hear a pin drop in the room. We then flip back to gags with our very own Filippa Bark sound-a-like creating green room havoc before we go back to the stage.
I’ve never been more happy and delighted with how one of my shows has gone. And as always I have to end it on a high. I may have dropped the backing track two whole tones but there’s even some video footage of me performing ‘Rise Like A Phoenix’ dressed as the bearded lady herself. I’m not really sure if it’s adult-appropriate, never mind kid friendly, but you can be the judge of that.
Annoying this year the Grand Final of the competition is in Borås on the other side of Sweden on Monday May 25th. It means travelling fairly early on Sunday 24th May which means no Eurovision Final for me this year. It’ll be worth it if we win the trophy, and to be honest it’ll be worth it if we don’t as well. There’s no point doing all of this Eurovision stuff if you don’t learn and apply those principles to the stage yourself after all and it makes my job a million times better sharing my love and passion with so many others.
Pictures by NDR and Alison Wren (junioreurovision.tv)
