How Eurovision became the TV music event of the year, as Olly Alexander takes centre stage

Former pop stars? Well, that's a different story. Blue sang I Can in 2011, only to find that, actually, when it came to landing a top ten placing, they couldn’t. Bonnie Tyler spent much of the 2013 final holding out for something more than a zero, finally scraping a paltry 23 points. Future pop stars? Sure, Sam Ryder became a household name in 2022 thanks to his cosmological cri de coeur, Space Man. But when newly solo Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander takes to the stage in Malmo this Saturday to sing Dizzy, he will do so as someone whose band's most-recent album, Night Call, landed at number one in the first of its 23-week run in the UK charts.

To understand why Eurovision can now attract a pop star at the top of his game, we need to step back and look at what, almost by stealth, Eurovision has become over the past 25 years.

A tournament that was once a byword for naffness, synonymous with sexless balladeering, baffling schlager ditties and cabaret corn, has become the music television event of the year. In the UK last year, it secured its highest audience share since records began, while over in Sweden almost a third of the population saw their country triumph with Loreen's pneumatic power ballad, Tattoo.

The staging of the event has evolved to mirror its growing importance, with this year's production designers having worked on Beyoncé's Renaissance tour and Abba Voyage. What you’ll see when you tune in is the most ambitious presentation the contest has ever seen: a cross-shaped stage positioned in the middle of the Malmo Arena made up of moveable LED cubes and floors.

Right at the centre of that revolution is the music itself. As we go to press, the bookmakers’ favourite is Swiss offering The Code by singing, rapping, violin-playing force of nature Nemo, in which they detail the turbulent journey to realising their non-binary identity.

Also in the frame is Croatia's Baby Lasagna, whose stirring immigration anthem Rim Tim Tagi Dim issues a powerful reminder that sublime and ridiculous don't have to sleep in separate beds. "Ay, I'm a big boy now," intones the Croat poet. "I'm going away and I sold my cow."

When it comes to risk-taking pop, the Swiss and Croatian entries are by no means alone. As Eurovision memoirist William Lee Adams explains, "More than any other year, Eurovision 2024 is a wild rodeo ride. You've got Angelina Mango from Italy singing Cumbia music with hot, spicy passion and then there's Joost from the Netherlands with Europapa, a bonkers but passionate anthem to free movement around Europe."

Perhaps it's finally time to set aside our accumulated memories of the whimsical commentary box put-downs that came as standard in the days when Terry Wogan was our guide to the madness on stage. Just because we thought that Eurovision was naff, it didn't mean other countries felt that way.

According to Dr Dean Vuletic, author of Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest, the very question itself says a lot about the way we still view ourselves, with perhaps a certain sense of entitlement when it comes to our status as a pop nation.

He mentions the response in 1968 when Cliff Richard’s Congratulations lost out to Spain by just one point, prompting newspapers to imply that Spanish state television had rigged the vote on behalf of General Franco's fascist regime: "All that soft power you didn't know you had, because you never lacked it? The visibility Britain had through its language and its pop culture – for other countries, there are few international platforms that allow them to have that same visibility."

By contrast, Vuletic talks about the way Abba's Waterloo suddenly amplified Sweden's reach after the 1974 contest. "No country has done better out of Eurovision than Sweden with Abba. Prior to Abba, Sweden was not a power when it came to popular culture. Now its third-biggest export industry is popular music. And when you combine that with the soft power potential of companies such as H&M and Ikea, then that's pretty amazing."

What Sweden seemed to realise accidentally with Abba's victory 50 years ago was something that the group themselves knew all along – that this could be the cannon that would blast them to huge international success. That when the world is watching, you need to supplant all their preconceptions about you and replace them with something way better.

Abba studied the British pop charts and set about planning their moment like a world-class bank robber would plan a heist. Bjorn Ulvaeus recalls, "I know that we wanted to pack it with energy. It's all energy, energy, energy. That was during the glam-rock era and groups like Slade and Sweet, those British bands… All those records were so full of energy. And we wanted to pack that much energy into Waterloo as well."

In a poll conducted by BBC One for the channel's 2020 TV special Eurovision: Come Together, Waterloo was voted the greatest Eurovision song of all time, followed by Conchita Wurst's 2014 winner Rise Like a Phoenix.

What does that tell us about what it takes to come up with a winning formula in 2024? Not much, according to Katrina Leskanich of Katrina and the Waves, whose Love Shine a Light was the last British winner, back in 1997.

"Was Love Shine a Light really the best song?" ponders the singer, most remembered for her group's 1985 hit Walking on Sunshine. "I'm not sure. I'll tell you something, though. It wasn't even written for Eurovision. It was written for the Swindon branch of Samaritans. Our drummer's brother worked there, and they needed a theme tune for their 50th-anniversary celebrations. So our guitarist Kimberley Rew wrote it and we shoved it in the bottom drawer, thinking it was too Eurovision to put on one of our records. So when we got an approach to submit a song, we submitted it."

Leskanich remains proud of Love Shine a Light, but adds that "so much of what happens depends on the night, on what all the other songs are. There was a good feeling about the UK that week, because Tony Blair had just come to power and he was hugely popular across Europe. All that stuff plays a part."

In other words, context and politics matter. Without it, would Ukraine's Kalush Orchestra have secured an outright win in 2022 for their entry Stefania? The prospect of three minutes broadcasting to an entire continent is a chance to influence the narrative – and occasionally, argues Adams, turn Eurovision into a propaganda tool.

By way of example, he cites A Million Voices, Russia's 2015 near-winner by Polina Gagarina – who subsequently became a prominent figure at pro-Putin rallies – which promoted the notion that Russia was a peacemaker in that part of the world. The uneasy truce in the old Soviet Union was something that didn't go unnoticed by Terry Wogan back in 2008, when Russia received 12 points from Ukraine. In remarks that now seem prescient, he muttered: "Ukraine just want to be sure that the old electricity and the oil flows through."

"Anyone who feels that politics has no place in Eurovision probably hasn't been paying that much attention," says Adams when asked about calls from Swedish musicians such as Robyn and First Aid Kit to exclude Israel's Eden Golan from this year's contest. Golan's song was originally called October Rain and featured lyrics directly referencing Hamas's 7 October attack on Israel, but was rejected by the Eurovision Broadcasting Union, prompting a new lyric that now answers to the name of Hurricane.

Eurovision has always, to a greater or lesser extent, acted as a detailed tapestry of what's happening across the continent at any given time. That has been a constant going back to the very first contest in 1956, when West Germany fielded an entry by Holocaust survivor Walter Andreas Schwarz with a self-composed autobiographical song in the chanson style whose title translates as Luckily in the Waiting Room.

So how best to think of Eurovision and the place it holds in the collective psyche? Rather like Camp chicory coffee and those people who walk around pubs with a tray of seafood, if we didn't already have it, no one would invent it. It's a space that exists to be claimed by anyone who needs it badly enough. And since 1998, when Dana International emerged victorious with Diva, the biggest driver of Eurovision's resurgence has been the visibility of LGBTQ+ singers in the contest.

The sight of the Israeli singer emerging victorious that May night had an unforgettable effect on the then nine-year-old Rylan, watching in Stepney, east London. "I didn't entirely understand why it was such a big deal," recalls the Radio 2 presenter, who was a member of the UK’s song selection committee this year. "But then to find out, obviously, that Dana was trans… my brain was a bit, like, 'Oh, so that woman has not always been a woman'. That was my first connection with Eurovision, seeing everyone talking about it. It was fun, but also there was a sort of gravity to that moment."

The success of Diva is a splash whose ripples continue to push outwards and was followed by winning turns from Serbia's Marija Serifovic in 2007 and Austria's Conchita Wurst in 2014.

If anything, then, it feels overdue that finally in 2024 Britain gets to be represented in Eurovision by an LGBTQ+ singer. Russell T Davies, who selected Olly Alexander as the lead in his 2021 Channel 4 drama It's a Sin, says: "Look, I'm biased, I love the man. And I'm fascinated to see how much his appeal transcends borders. There's something so unusual about Olly, something shifting and elemental. He's like a sprite. Or a devil. I never quite know what's going on in his eyes. I wonder how that'll come across on a tough, huge production like Eurovision.

"I worry that big, huge voices win on the night. He's more interesting than that. But Eurovision keeps changing – just when you think it's all about big ballads and key changes, along comes Netta [the defiantly outlandish Israeli 2018 winner]. So my hopes are high!"

Read more:

• Eurovision 2024 contestants: All 37 countries and acts taking part
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Alexander himself says he has "put all thoughts of winning to one side". Expectation management is wise at this stage. Although the surging happy-sad Europop of Dizzy will surely see his star rise across Europe – with a projected 200 million streams of the song on just that one night – current betting doesn't have Alexander right up there with the leaders. But as Rylan points out, "A lot can change in the fortnight leading up to the contest. Staging is definitely a factor."

Regardless of what happens on the night, as Alexander says, "It really isn't about coming first. So many Eurovision moments that have stayed with me and inspired me happened with songs that didn't even go beyond the semi-finals. That's not what it's about."

So what is it ultimately about? "It's not real life," says Adams. "It's the opposite. For three minutes on the Eurovision stage, everything is perfect. This is a moment where you can put aside all the drama, all the trauma, sing your heart out and be appreciated. Because every Eurovision performance – whether it's difficult, whether it's easy – ends with applause."

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The Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final airs Saturday 11th May at 8pm on BBC One, BBC iPlayer, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Sounds.

You can also check out the full list of Eurovision winners and how many times the UK has won Eurovision.

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