This doesn't happen very often. With around six months to go until Europe's best singers (ahem) gather in Baku for the 57th Eurovision Song Contest, French telly has revealed the identity of the performer going out there with the tricolor wrapped around her heart (and hopefully not her vocal chords). Anggun is originally from Indonesia but has been popular in France since the late 1990s. Her latest mission was unveiled in the French press this morning where a spokesmadame for the France 3 station indicated that Anggun was selected because 'she is known in lots of other countries' and this is now considered a key to Contest success.

It would be churlish to point out that nobody outside of Azerbaijan had heard of Ell/Nikki before May - and perhaps not even afterwards - but that should not stop Boom Bang a Blog wishing Anggun all the best in Baku. One has a feeling the song will be a tad different from the usual Eurovision stereotype.

Hello. Don't all the people in the picture above these words look smashing? They are, in fact, members of a performing arts class at Liverpool Community College who kindly invited me in to their performance space (see, I know all this lingo, having done Theatre Studies for one year at Glasgow University) to answer questions about Eurovision.

Happy birthday to BBC Telly! The broadcasting organisation which many a Eurovision fan never has a good word for started sending shiny moving images down people's chimneys 75 years ago this week and there are all sorts of archive clips floating about the web and the news channels today to mark the occasion. One of these is an interesting chat with Yvonne Littlewood, the woman who was responsible for making the 1963 competition, broadcast from the relatively new Television Centre, look about 10 times more modern than the Contests which preceded it (It's certainly the first one which is more of a televisual event than a musical one).

You can see Yvonne herself chatting about the event which took place almost 50 years ago (even before Doctor Who had started...) in one of the clippets compiled on the BBC website. You'll have to scroll down to find her. The link is here.