内容摘要："He means what he says,” Mr Biden said. “We don't take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about, 'If we lose, it'll be a bloodbath’.”

"He means what he says,” Mr Biden said. “We don't take him seriously. He means it. All the stuff about, 'If we lose, it'll be a bloodbath’.”

"We were exhausted every night," he recalls. "This year is better. We've even got an extra backstage tent where we prepare the props."Props are a huge part of Eurovision. The tradition started at the second ever contest in 1957, when Germany's Margot Hielscher sang part of her song

into (you guessed it) a telephone.Over the intervening decades, the staging has become ever more elaborate. In 2014, Ukraine's Mariya Yaremchuk trapped one of her dancers in a giant hamster wheel, while Romania brought a literal cannon to their performance in 2017.This year, we've got disco balls, space hoppers, a magical food blender, a Swedish sauna and, for the UK, a fallen chandelier.

"It's a big logistics effort, actually, to get all the props organised," says Damaris Reist, deputy head of production for this year's contest."It's all organised in a kind of a circle. The [props] come onto the stage from the left, and then get taken off to the right.

"Backstage, the props that have been used are pushed back to the back of the queue, and so on. It's all in the planning."

During the show, there are several secret passageways and "smuggling routes" to get props in and out of vision, especially when a performance requires new elements half-way through.We spoke to the six contestants with the best odds, to find out what makes their Eurovision entries stand out.

KAJ are the first Finnish act to represent Sweden at the Eurovision, hailing from the coastal town of Vörå, where Swedish is still the main language.A comedy troupe who met at school, they've been performing together for more than 15 years – and were the surprise winners of Sweden's Melodifestivalen, where the public selects the country's Eurovision entry, earlier this year.

Their song, Bara Bada Bastu, is an accordian-led tribute to sauna culture (Finland has more than three million saunas, one for every two people)."It felt like a natural thing to sing about," says Kevin Holmström. "We really like the sauna. It's universal."