



Buckle up kids, one senses that it could be a long old year...

Well here we all are again. As soon as the leaves start going a bit musty, then sure as chips are potatoes the Swiss embark on their ultimately fruitless task to pick a Eurovision winner. Or qualifier even. And so it was that the Italian wing of Swiss telly revealed their short-list, and boy they're a bland bunch in the main, shy of the lad Sebalter's ominous returnBut do you know what? I always hope that the first song I hear each year is going to be the one that works its way through to become the eventual winner. It's been a long held dream of mine, and I'm sure it's going to happen one day. But not this time.Yep, Davide Buzzi's Mama is a ponderous old pub rock plodder, with some ludicrous spoken bits, and his Brummie mate Judith Emeline shipped in to do all the heavy lifting. I assumed that he was just some bar room chancer, but a little look into his background suggests that this gravel-voiced mumbler has got a reasonable track record in both music and the moving picture. But surely even that isn't going to drag this hackneyed throb onto an El Al jet to Tel Aviv.