Recently in Eurovision National Finals Category

WHAT do you think? The right man for the job? Someone who knows enough about what has worked well in the past to come up with an equally viewer-friendly variation on a theme for the 21st Century?

But enough about Matt Smith Being chosen as the eleventh Doctor Who. It's Andrew Lloyd Webber and Your Country Needs You that Boom Bang a Blog is here to chatter about.

These are the six acts through to the live knockout stages to find the UK entry for Moscow.

One of them will take a Lloyd Webber-penned tune to the yowge Olimpiskiy stadium in the Russian capital in late May and hopefully scoop some silverware for Royaume Uni while they're at it.

Did you see the show? What did you think? Well, the Boom Bang a Blog verdict on our six hopefuls is just this way...

As I type, the Eurovision Song Contest is 143 days away (I checked on an online calendar countdown thingy, please don't think I have such facts lingering conveniently about my brain) - and the Albanians aren't leaving anything to chance by choosing their entry for Moscow while a significant section of the Eurovision audience is pulling giblets out of frozen turkeys.

The final night of the Festivali i Kenges took place in Tirana on Sunday evening - and Boom Bang a Blog had the rare pre-Crimbo treat of watching the live webcast.

With six months to go before a single note is sung in Moscow, tabloids in various Eurovision member states are already chockful of gossip about who could be carrying the pride of a nation on their voicebox next May.

Over in Ireland, fans have been getting a tad anxious that no official news about their national heat has been released - usually, this sort of stuff is all sorted long before Christmas. But that delay could all be down to one man - Johnny Logan.

Here's some slightly encouraging news. Following a recent Lord-related announcement, Irish bookmakers Paddy Power have given odds of 9/1 of the UK winning the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest, as well as a 3/1 chance that the song Andrew Lloyd Webber pens for Blighty hits the top of the charts.

This is all a lot more positive than the bookies' odds posted in the run-up to Belgrade.

Lord Andrew Sir Lloyd Webber (LASLW) has been chatting to those trendy types at Radio 1 about the Eurovision challenge which lies ahed of him in the coming months.

LASLW has some interesting things to say about the Your Country Needs You process - including some rather surprising info about the type of song he has in mind.

In addition to the news of Lord Lloyd Webber's national songwriting duty, Oswald Moseley's paper of choice, the Daily Mail, has announced that the Lord may join forces with lyrical powerhouse, Sir Tim Rice, to write next year's UK entry.

They haven't worked together since finishing Evita in 1976. If the reports are true, then Eurovision really is living up to its raison d'etre of unifying warring factions via the gift of song.

Sigh...

Rowetta, Charlotte Church, Beverley Knight and Heather Small... please make a note of the website address this man is about to give out.

Chanelle off Big Brother, Jordan, John Barrowman and anyone with zero experience of singing live in front of a huge crowd... under no circumstances watch this video and promise that you will never watch it, or follow the instructions given within it by this musical Lord of the realm, ever.

Ever, ever. Swear down, no lie.

And don't cross your fingers behind your back.

...but a number of countries are already going public with their preparations for the 2009 Song Contest in Moscow.

Earlier this week, Swedish Tv carried a live broadcast of the announcement of all-but-four of the song titles and composers which will battle it out in Melodifestivalen 2009 (we said the Swedes took it seriously). There'll be four 'wildcard' acts, Swedish household names who get a direct ticket in to the line-up to make the public extra-keen to watch, announced a bit later on.

Greece has already announced who'll be singing for them in Moscow. This year's bronze-medalling nation will despatch 2004 bronze-medaller (and 2006 Contest co-host) Sakis Rouvas (pictured) to Russia in May. At a press conference this week he made plenty of rumblings about anything other than first place being failure. Rouvas got the UK's douze in Istanbul with an extremely dodgy vocal to the rather limp song Shake It! (what were we thinking?)

If you were watching that fateful evening, you may remember him whipping his jacket off halfway through the performance to reveal his vested torso (he used to be one of Greece's national athletes), before he started spinning around like... well, a big girl, if we're honest.

But nobody, nobody, comes close in the 'early doors effort' stakes than Bulgaria...

A fair old source of juicy gossip sprang into being at this year's Euro Bash in Birmingham - and tragically - Boom Bang a Blog was strolling around the Bullring when it was revealed (how slack).

Don't fear - we have been retrospectively filled in (we asked the Council for permission) and can reveal all.

It's about the swinging sixties, the BBC and an act of cold-melodied revenge.

Bet you can't wait to read the next bit...

September is a notoriously sparse month for Eurovision news, but here in the UK we've had two Contest-tastic nuggets in less than a week.

Hot on the heels of the news of the juries' return in Moscow, today (Wednesday), several newspapers are reporting that HRH Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber (thank you to Look Around You for that joke) is playing a key role in next year's selection process for the United Kingdom.

It's unlikely Sir Andy will be penning our 2009 tune (he's not too hot at bringing songs to a close in under three minutes), but he could be taking on a mentor-type role in an I'd Do Anything/Any Dream Will Do-type primetime selection process which will marry up a singer with a song.

Nothing has been confirmed by the BBC yet - but it sounds encouraging.

(NOTE: In 1969, the not-yet-famous Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice submitted a song called Try It and See for the BBC's Eurovision panel to consider as a potential entry for Lulu to perform in Madrid. The tune never made it through the first sift. You can now hear a reworked version of that entry throughout the world in productions of Jesus Christ Superstar. It's called King Herod's Song).