With the cancellation of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, which was to have taken place over the weekend in Rotterdam, the BBC aired a tribute substitute EUROVISION: COME TOGETHER, hosted by Graham Norton and featuring a shortlist of 19 songs from the past 65 years with viewers asked to vote for their favourite. ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’, a song about the joys of surrendering to love, was declared the viewers favourite of all time.

Written by the Swedish supergroup’s two B’s – Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Anderson – with lyrics by Stig Anderson, it won the 1974 Eurovision contest held in Brighton, topping the charts in several countries, selling six million copies and launching ABBA’s rapid rise to become one of the most popular international group ever. The previous year they were third with ‘Ring, Ring’.

At the 50th Anniversary of Eurovision in 2005, ‘Waterloo’ was also declared the best song in the competition’s history. After the group split in 1982, it was supposed to be a temporary break, said Benny in a recent interview, but both he and Bjorn were persuaded by Sir Tim Rice to get involved in musical theatre and didn’t see the immediate need to go back to ABBA. They have written the music for two of the most successful and acclaimed West End and Broadway productions, CHESS (1984), the Cold War allegory with Sir Tim and MAMMA MIA! (1999), the jukebox musical written by Catherine Johnson and based on Bjorn and Benny’s backlog of ABBA hits. The title is from their 1975 chart topper.

After Saturday’s tribute show, the BBC joined other European broadcasters to present EUROVISION: EUROPE SHINE A LIGHT, honouring the 41 songs that would have competed in this year’s contest, interviewing, via satellite a host of past winners including Bjorn, who said that the Eurovision celebration “allows you to escape and be happy and even forget about the coronavirus for a little while.”

Appropriately he was a guest on Graham Norton’s BBC Radio 2 show at in September, last year, where he signed this quick portrait sketch for me as he was leaving the studios at Wogan House in London.