Jessica Garlick
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Welsh singer Jessica Garlick, born in 1981, made her first steps into showbusiness when she was 16. At that age she won the Welsh finale for the tv-show Star For A Night. The same year she also featured at Michael Barrymore's My Kind of Music.
In 2002 she was among the last ten contestants for the famous reality show Pop Idol, the show that made Gareth Gates and Will Young into international stars. Jessica Garlick wasn't unnoticed either, as the BBC invited her to sing Come Back, one of the competing songs in A Song for Europe, the British selection for the Eurovision Song Contest 2002. The audience selected her to represent the United Kingdom at the event in Tallinn, where with a strong vocal performance she took her country to easily its best result since Imaani's Where Are You? in 1998, finishing joint third alongside Estonia's representative Sahlene.
Later that year she was involved in a campaign to help kids stop smoking. In subsequent years, she has found that her strong showing in Eurovision has entitled her to become something of a regular television pundit on the contest. She made a guest appearance in the 2003 Song for Europe, during which she was charged with announcing the results of the Welsh televote, which handed top marks to the ill-fated Jemini. Later in the year, she appeared in Eurovision preview and analysis programmes, in which among other things she performed an acoustic version of Come Back, and took somewhat gratuitous delight in picking fault with the physical appearance of Ukraine's debut entrant Oleksandar. The joke was on her, though, when she admitted that she couldn't actually tell whether, in espousing a universal philosophy for mankind, the colourful Austrian representative Alf Poier was being earnest or simply 'having a laugh'.