#interval acts

Only two musical extras this year - first last year's winners, The Olsen Brothers kick things off with a reprise of 2000's winning song Fly on the Wings of Love, segueing neatly into their new song Walk Right Back accompanied by four be-tartaned female pipers.

The opening song by last year's winner has been done before, but in 2001 it feels as if this performance establishes it firmly in the schedule. It gets the crowd on their feet and cheering right from the off. The Danes' warmth and genuine enthusiasm for their winners is palpable, and the Olsen's seem to be one the only bands of the evening who actually enjoyed the experience of standing in front of all those people. They may not have had the nervousness of competing for their country this year, but it is a homecoming to celebrate.

Befitting a stadium, the interval has a big name. Possibly Denmark's hottest pop export up to 2001, Aqua. They perform a medley of their biggest hits in hyperactive, irreverent style and do truly light up those moments while the EBU get to work verifying the votes. They have all the pyro, all the effects and their stage gear does actually fill the stage.

Far from static, singers Lene Nystrøm and René Dif are everywhere around the stage, bouncing upstage, downstage, left and right. Lene does kick off Barbie Girl with a heartfelt 'fuck off Ken' and finishes by telling him he's a 'dirty bastard', and she's not wrong. The band and record label were still in legal dispute with Mattel over the song at the time.

That's not only the swearing of the evening as in one of the short ad breaks during the main competition sequence, the hosts perform a short skit (with rhyming of course) in which Søren fumbles the 'trophy' dropping it and smashing it into pieces. 'Shit' he says, understandably. Luckily it's only a prop and Natasja is keeping the real one safe.

All this swearing led to the BBC in the UK having to make two apologies. One to the public for swearing going out on live TV and one to host broadcaster DR for Terry Wogan repeatedly insulting the hosts for their looks and rhyming. Not an enlightening evening.

The benefit of having a bona fide, 100% genuine pop star as a host is that the interval act is sorted. It's right there. In Oslo they had Morten Harket, and such was their extravagance, they had him as the opening song. They put on a huge separate interval act without him

Ireland and RTÉ weren't going to look a gift horse in the mouth and neither were Boyzone's management. The interval was Ronan and his fellow Boyzone band members performing their song Let the Message Run Free. Initially this just had Ronan on his own with a dance troupe, but he was soon joined by the boys dressed in full black leather trench coat ensemble, anticipating The Matrix by at least a year. They even got some choreography at the end to match the dancers.

This is Boyzone at the absolute pinnacle of their popularity. They were trying to make a push to break into the US market. To this day they're the second most popular boy band in the UK chart history after Take That. They're were also popular across Europe, so this is Eurovision getting a big name to start at the centre of the show - another attempt to get Eurovision to more credible and marketable across Europe.

If I'm honest, despite the contemporary big name, it's not particularly memorable. What you think of it will entirely depend on how well you think of Boyzone. There's no trip around Ireland on video. Nothing traditional, although Ireland have already ticked that off in 1994 and 1995. This is as straightforward a pop performance as you can get. And it only lasts about six minutes.

It's almost necessary when talking about Dublin 1994 to mention the interval act.

Up to this point, interval acts have been some local song and dance, maybe some comedy intended to kill time while the jury votes are counted and verified and telecommunication links can be established to all the capitals of Europe. The downtime before the hosts can unveil their super-scoreboard and the whole glory of European friendships and animosities can be revealed.

In a sense, what Ireland chose in 1994 was exactly this. A group of traditional Irish dancers with some novel choreography with a mystical Celtic backing song. On paper this was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

But something clicked. The build from having Michael Flatley and Jean Butler doing their solos, to dancing together, to being joined by ranks of synchronised legs moving and tapping simultaneously on a stage was utterly hypnotising. Many remember this Eurovision purely for Riverdance when they can't remember who won or any of the other songs. Riverdance went on to become a trans-Atlantic success story and is one of the rare Eurovision exports that went world-wide almost overnight.

It also meant that from now on every Eurovision was going to have to match that. The interval act was now something to be talked about and anticipated.

For the interval, the BBC decided to go for something representative of modern Britain. At the time of the contest, the main spoken word radio station in the UK, BBC Radio 4 opened every day with a medley made up of UK folk tunes and pieces with associations with particular regions inside the UK.

This seems to be similar in thinking to the interval act. Several groups of musicians and dancers representing various cultures that make up the UK circa 1998 all performing an arrangement of Holst's 'Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity' Starting of with the inevitable group of Scottish pipers.

There's a Welsh male voice choir, the Grimethorpe colliery brass band, an Irish harp and whistle. Hang on. Ireland? Yes Northern Ireland, but Ireland? This isn't 1921. But I suppose there's a significant and large Irish community within the UK, and the Good Friday Agreement has been voted on and signed, so we'll let it pass...

..Bhangra dancers? Now it's feeling even more awkward. Yes, it's good to see not only Indian but representation at Eurovision and to acknowledge that Indian communities make up a significant and welcome part of a diverse UK population. Bhangra is especially big in Birmingham too, but aren't there some overtones of...

...Zulu dancing? OK, it's time to say it. Colonialism. It's not intended. It's supposed to be a celebration of multiculturalism and inclusion, but looking at it from 2023, the sight of various cultures singing and dancing to a piece of music to which the words of Sir Cecil Spring Rice, "I Vow to Thee My Country", have been set, it feels like a final nationwide spasm of Empire.

Vanessa Mae (from Singapore) and Lesley Garrett finish things off with the patriotic triumphant conclusion to the production.

It's a misfire - the arrangement is all over the place, trying to force different musical styles onto a 20th century classical piece in rapid-fire succession. The best thing about it is the magnificent blocking and control of camera angles that hide almost completely the movements of the large groups of musicians and dancers as they come and go from the stage.

The interval act for Oslo 1996 didn't break as much new ground as the stage design. It followed the principles laid down in former years - showing the host country's landscape and culture, including dance and theatrical performances and featuring a central musical performance.

In this case the cultural elements were Stev, a traditional form of Norwegian folk music and included several other Norwegian musicians encompassing everything from jazz to joik. Perhaps the most memorable element of it was that once the film touring Norway was at end, the performance on stage involved a mix of bizarre circus performers mixed with some actors dressed up as oil-workers all looking suitably nonplussed at everything that was going on around them.

It wasn't another Riverdance unfortunately, but it did show off all the main elements of the stage design, spreading across all three stages simultaneously.