Do you remember when Still In Love With You was initially revealed and everyone simultaneously went “that’s rubbish”?
Meet our not-quite-handsome-but-not-quite-ugly hopefuls for this year Joe and Jake, contestants from series four of The Voice UK who beat five other hopeful acts in the public vote to represent the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest in May. They’re sort of like a crap Busted, but in a good way. The song is called You’re Not Alone.
My clubbing days are behind me but if I was in an indie club and this came on we’d totally start jumping about to that chorus. I’d suggest initially at least it’s probably one level of intensity down from being truly great but who knows how it will develop between now and the 14th May.
We were pretty stoked for this when we heard about it last month, Friend Of The Bar Tom Scott‘s new web series is Game On where four Youtube stars compete in head to head games of comedy, skill and strategy devised by Bother’s Bar Schlag den Raab live commentator David Bodycombe.
The first one today is Rock Paper Scissors Hammer Helmet, in a preview event I ended up smacking Tom Scott around the head with a pool noodle in a demonstration.
I know one of the other games coming up but I won’t spoil, other to say you’ll dig it if you dig The Genius Deathmatches. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, you’re advised to subscribe to Tom’s Youtube channel for this and factual entertainment.
Ken Bruce is premiering each song on his Radio 2 show, although if you don’t fancy that they’re also going to be on the BBC Eurovision blog once they’ve been played.
In other news Matt Allwright has been announced as the host of the BBC’s new upcoming daytime quiz The Code. The Code sees variable teams of 1-3 answer questions in order to find the code to a safe which starts with £3,000 and increases by £500 every time a team fails. 25 x 45 minute episodes in the order, we liked Matt Allwright on The Exit List so we’ll see.
Well it had to happen eventually, a Robot Wars-esque gameshow about drones, and it’s no accident that it might look and feel Robot Wars-esque given that this too apparently comes from original TV RW-supremo Steve Carsey. It even has house drones, apparently.
Will Best and Rachel Stringer guide four teams through elimination rounds testing flying skills ending in a head to head laser based dogfight.
The clips we’ve seen make it look very cool, somewhere between Metropolis and Tron, but bearing in mind we’re likely to be much older than the intended audience will it stand up to repeated viewing? Watch it and let us know what you think in the comments.
This has been one of the bigger stories today, the Eurovision scoring system is having a massive overhaul. Rather than having countries mark in the Strictly Come Dancing style, where the jury vote and the popular vote are ranked separately and combined to give a final vote tally, this year each country will give two separate sets of points – a jury vote and a televote – effectively doubling the number of points on offer. In theory this means that influence is still 50/50 between juries and televoters, but it’s calculated in a different, apparently fairer way. A song that does well with the jury but bombs with the televote, or vice versa, should now be able to pick up points where previously the disparity may have left it outside a country’s top ten picking up nothing.
How will this be represented on the night? The Eurovision site suggests that the jury votes will be read out 1-12 in the traditional manner. After all the juries have declared the points earned from all the country’s televotes combined will be revealed starting with the song which scored the least, so if Germany let’s say scored 7 points in the French televote, 5 points in the Belgian televote and 1 pt from the UK televote they would get 13 points added to their jury score to get their final total, whereas a country that does very well, like the UK, might get a big wodge like 276 points just added to their jury score towards the end. You won’t have to sit through all the countries declaring again, it’ll all come at once.
Why do this? The official line is that it will make the voting more exciting on the night. Previously, even with algorithms, there will always be a pull-away point where the winning song is the clear winner in the voting. Using the patented Big Wodge system nobody will quite sure until right up to the end.
Why full jury results and not full televote results when that’s likely to be of more interest? Fair question. My take is that having the night finish on the whim of half a billion people is more dramatic than finishing the night on the whims of around 200 jury members. The televote scoring will still be available online after the show.
Sweden’s Melodifestivalen (their Eurovision selection process) has successfully used variations of the Big Wodge system for almost twenty years, but it works slightly differently to how it’s being used for Eurovision. Under their current rules the televote is converted into a percentage and songs receive that percentage of the points (equal to the amount of points the juries can give). Of course this couldn’t work like for like for Eurovision where countries can’t vote for themselves and each country has a different population.
Tl;dr?
For anyone confused by the new Eurovision voting system, I've put together this handy diagram. pic.twitter.com/ruTrx5L1tQ
