Sweden

Hero Charlotte Perrelli

Never a contest of cutting-edge music, Eurovision is great for nostalgia. Penning reviews of the 43 songs competing in it this year, all of them designed to serve much the same purpose, has taken me back to my junior high school days and endless English classes on essay structure: motivators, theses, topic sentences and clinchers, plus the all-important art of paraphrasing. If you want what you're saying to stand any chance of convincing your audience, you have to have all of these things and know how to put them together. If you have several things to say and they all need to come across, you should also be skilled in masquerading rehashed material in a way that is authoritative enough to outweigh any sense of it having all been heard before. Not that the approach is unique to writing; the same applies to music, especially to Eurovision, and to one country more than any other: Sweden.

“Everything has a beginning and everything comes to an end,” sings Charlotte Perrelli in the opening lines of Hero, the Swedish entry in Belgrade, and the country's obsession with systematic schlager is the exception that proves the rule. As one of the more consistently successful nations in the contest in recent years it is easy to see why Sweden would want to stick to a winning formula, but at the same time that success tends to disguise the fact that they have not sent anything remotely resembling modern music to Eurovision in a very long time. Not that they are required to, of course, but it is particularly obvious this year when they find themselves in close quarters with the equally uptempo entries from Iceland and Ukraine and will be followed on stage in Belgrade by one of the few songs in the 2008 contest that proudly wears its individualism on its sleeve.

As any writer worth his salt knows, structure is nothing without content. Whether you're putting together an essay or arranging three minutes of pop, the framework you use will only ever be as good as the bits you use to connect it all together. This is where Hero works best, at least in a musical sense: what expectations you might have of it are never subverted, and what it presents it does so with a self-assurance borne of knowing you pressed all the buttons in the right order and made it sound pretty good in the process. Granted, this is not the most arduous of tasks when, like all good authors, you pilfer the best bits of other people's work (the most blatant example here being the much vaunted key change, which is lifted straight from It's Raining Men).

Presentation-wise it's more of the same, but being the visual creatures we are, this could be the start of the song's undoing: slick to the point of robotic, it is performed with a consumate professionalism that lacks any kind of character or charm. It certainly doesn't help that Ms Perrelli fits the role of automaton so perfectly; she looks like the love child of Donnatella Versace and Kryten from Red Dwarf and only adds to the sense of the whole thing being far too plastic for its own good. Hero would also be marked down for its lyrics if anyone set much store by them, as they are some of the most meaningless of any song to compete in Eurovision in quite some time. On a superficial listening they give the impression that you're dealing with an anthem; closer inspection reveals nothing more than a series of largely disconnected maxims and rhyming dictionary economy.

But that's pop for you, which is why a song that should be one of the least appealing entries of the year works so well. Sweden have a knack of putting two and two together and almost always coming up with four, and while it still might not amount to much, it's enough for most people. The fact that Ms Perrelli is virtually guaranteed to put in a flawless vocal performance should be enough, in context, to see them qualify, even if half of their fan base has tickets to the Tuesday night show. A lot will depend on whether the televoters are happy to allow two big-voiced ladies with stomping pop numbers through or whether they will restrict themselves to the one, in which case I wouldn't want to bet on the outcome of a head-to-head with Ukraine. There is always one fan favourite each year knocked out in the preliminary stages, and I don't see why it shouldn't be the Swedes this year.

The good that could come of Hero ending up as the 2008 contest's most high profile casualty would be if Sweden were to start thinking about changing their strategy, and bringing something fresh to the table rather than wheeling out the same thing year after year. Whatever the composition, playing with the structure and mixing up your content often leads to better writing and lends your voice more authority. DIY schlager is an integral part of the Eurovision experience and a surefire crowd pleaser given who you're playing to, ticking all of their boxes, but taking both the audience and yourselves out of their comfort zone, even if only occasionally, can only be a good thing.