Take Your Partners...

By Jamie McLoughlin on Jul 25, 08 10:17 AM

Details are creeping towards the dancefloor of just who is going to be involved in this year's Eurovision Dance Contest, to be staged in front of a 2,000-strong crowd at Glasgow's SECC on Saturday, September 6.

Despite Boom Bang a Blog's call for Lorraine Kelly to be one of the presenters, the BBC is sticking with last year's hosting team of Graham Norton and Claudia Winkleman (bah, they're good - but Lorraine would have been better...)

The very important people at the European Broadcasting Union have decreed that this year, the 15 countries taking part will (and we're quoting the rulebook here):

"Each participating broadcaster will present one qualified, mixed dancing couple (two dancers, one man and one woman) to represent its country in the EDC. One of the dancers must be a preofessional dancer, while the other, a non-professional dancer, known in a field other than dance."

Although it's unusual to find dancers (and indeed, non-dancers) hanging around fields in the United Kingdom, there is no need to panic. It basically means you'll have a proper dancer teamed up with a celebrity chef/stand-up comic/shamed politician, or something of that ilk. In fact, there's a good chance the home team will be represented by Strictly Come Dancing's winning pair of Alesha Dixon and Matthew Cutler - but no announcement has been made yet.

Although the Finns took 45 years to win the Song Contest, they are the inaugural winners of the Dance version (well done them), in the competition held at BBC Television Centre last year, with something rather sombre and (ahem) dull. Here is one of their two dances:

The Finns are back to defend their title, and as well as hosts the UK, the remaining 13 nations making up the Eurovision Dance Contest line-up are:

Austria, Azerbaijan, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Ukraine.

We'll have more info on the couples selected so far in the run-up to the event.

Before then, here's a reminder that this isn't Scotland's first attempt at hosting a Eurovision event.

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to...

...hang on, that's the voiceover from the start of The A Team.

Sorry, let's start again.

In 1972, Edinburgh kindly stepped in to host the Song Contest when 1971 winners Monaco just didn't have a big enough venue to welcome everyone to - well, the Millionaires' Playground is smaller than Hyde Park.

That year, the New Seekers represented the UK with the rather fabulous Beg, Steal or Borrow. It finished second to the entry from Luxembourg on the night - but thankfully the Luxembourgoisie possessed an ESC-friendly venue within their borders for the 1973 edition.

Here's Lyn Paul and her chums in action in front of the biggest telly in Scotland.