TRIUMPHANT Parkstone pop star Russ Spencer celebrated his band Scooch being chosen to represent the UK in this year's Eurovision Song Contest by pledging that he would do his best to bring top honours home from Helsinki for Britain.

"We are so proud to be representing our country," the 28-year-old told me. "Now all we want to do is to bring the title home. I'll be doing it for Britain and for Bournemouth."

Russ, who reformed the chartbusting Nineties band with fellow members David Ducasse, Natalie Powers and Caroline Barnes specially for the contest, says life has been a whirlwind of promotional activity ever since they romped to victory in a live TV broadcast.

He revealed that even when Terry Wogan mistakenly announced to millions of viewers that runner-up Cyndi Almounzi had won, it hadn't dampened their enthusiasm.

"I don't know why but I just knew that we'd won," said Russ. "We sort of heard Cyndi's name announced and went into automatic polite clapping for about five seconds before Fearne (Cotton) said that actually we were the winners.

"It was all so quick it really didn't register. It must have been far worse for Cyndi, who's an absolutely lovely girl."

Russ, who wrote the winning song Flying the Flag (For You), admits that although Scooch always believed they could win, the result came as a complete surprise and delight.

"Once we'd made the final two I was convinced it was in the bag, but before that we really didn't think we had too much of a chance. We were up against some big names.

"There was Justin Hawkins from The Darkness, Brian Harvey from East 17 and Liz from Atomic Kitten and they all had big publicity campaigns behind them.

"We didn't have anything like that, just the song and a determination to put on a good performance."

Eight years on from their first big chart successes, Russ says Scooch are more than prepared for pop stardom a second time around.

"The business has changed but so have we. We're seven or eight years older, more mature, more experienced and much better able to deal with it all."

All four had moved on to other projects when they decided to get back together and give Eurovision a go. Russ has been working as a TV presenter on shows like Channel 5's The Great British Quiz; Caroline had been performing in musical theatre in productions like The Producers, David was running a stage school and Natalie was a singing teacher.

But as Russ says: "All that has been put on hold for the time being. What we're concentrating on right now is winning the Eurovision Song Contest for Britain for the first time in 10 years."

And he really believes they can bring the title home from Finland.

"Obviously we know that some of the voting tends to be political but we're really not interested in getting involved in that. We reckon there's a huge gap in the pop market right now and we are concentrating entirely on the music and the performance."