‘The sound of beauty’ is the theme of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the final of which is taking place in Turin on Saturday night. It’s an appropriately meaningless assemblage of words. Sounds can be beautiful, I suppose, but does beauty have a sound? Never mind, it could easily have been ‘the wisdom of dreams’ or ‘the power of music’ or any other collection of agreeably abstract words and it wouldn’t have made a spot of difference.

It is nice to have Eurovision back in the unusual circumstances of one of its entrants invading another. Russia has been cast out this year — the European Broadcasting Union stating that their inclusion would bring the contest into disrepute. Ukraine is of course almost certain to win on the popular vote, barring an overwhelming backlash from the ‘expert ‘jury panels. Thankfully, the Ukrainian entry, ‘Stefania’ by Kalush Orchestra, is a good song, doing the traditional Eurovision thing of bashing together indigenous ethnic music and rap. In a normal year it wouldn’t particularly stand out, but its nostalgia for the sacrifices made by the singer’s mother now carries a heavy poignancy.

Elsewhere, if the semi-finals are anything to go by, Eurovision traditions remain intact. The banter of the three hosts is excruciatingly awkward (there was a great moment in the first semi when the hosts proudly announced that “Europe is here in all its diversity!” and the camera swooped in a grand arc over a stadium-full of white gay men of a certain age.) The staging is pleasingly barmy — there is a constantly flowing cascade of water around the edges of the stage which has already inspired even more than the usual number of loo breaks. And the voting is unfathomably eccentric, with Ireland’s song, about the only stone-cold, instantly catchy and contemporary ‘banger’ in the semis, failing to qualify for the final. Meanwhile several mimsy and indistinguishable ballads from the likes of Greece and Switzerland have made it through.