Eurovision: what have we learned?

By | May 23, 2021

Not much! I think there were some takeaways from last night though:

  • What the bloody hell were we thinking with Amanda Holden? Forget even the content for a minute, we constantly mock and get annoyed by the vote givers building their part, thanking the hosts for a great show, explaining how beautiful world peace is and whatever and nobody gives a toss – sometimes in French! Smile, give us the result, take your money, go away again. So why are we messing about now? It comes to something when potentially the most irritating one of the night, a ten year old Greek kid, is actually the least embarrassing of the lot.
  • Big Wodge Voting remains fantastic and dramatic television. Yes it is a bit on the nose for people who don’t score well, but I’m not sure there’s a way around that, if you’ve scored zero you’ve scored zero, rip the plaster off and get it done with. There *may be* an argument for going back to how it started, with the televotes being revealed from worst to best quite quickly and building up the last few, but the way they do it now accentuates the drama for when the juries and the viewers don’t agree throughout and not just at the end. There is an argument for a Pointless style tower graphic reveal.
  • We’re not going anywhere. It peaked at over 8m and in TV terms cost us peanuts, £300,000 is the figure going around as our contribution. That’s about 45 minutes of a weekly drama.
  • Complaining about Eurovision is the British way of enjoying Eurovision. Whilst I have enjoyed reading largely irrelevant po-faced opinions on Twitter, we don’t necessarily want to win, we want to feel hard-done-by – there will be nothing worse for us than a respectable 10th place finish. If we haven’t finished top three or bottom three, it’s not been a worthwhile Eurovision.
  • It’s not really about Brexit so get over yourselves. About half the countries involved in the Eurovision aren’t in the EU anyway, they still didn’t vote for us.
  • We still sent a song nobody really bought. Number 42 in the charts, apparently. Majorly flopped in the televoting. We almost scored a point from Poland’s jury.
  • What do we do next year? Enya, probably.

12 thoughts on “Eurovision: what have we learned?

  1. Danny Kerner

    Well i have gone through all the results and it has turned out that if the jury votes were individually taken rather than an average we would of scored over 50 points. the highest placed jury scored us 3rd place and that was Malta. Also malta gave us the highest places for both the combined jury vote and viewer vote.

    Reply
    1. James Turner

      Although splitting out the Jury votes like that would give us some points, I’m not sure how you’d sort it to keep things balanced with the public vote.
      The Juries feel like an anachronism, but also a lot of the fun with the differences to the public vote.

      Reply
      1. Brig Bother Post author

        They were actually bought back after several years of 100% televote. I don’t mind really, they can judge the writing and the public can judge the performance.

        Reply
  2. Brekkie

    Am I the only one who hates this new voting system and doesn’t find it being so weighted at the end as being “exciting”. Indeed it is somewhat cruel – the Switzerland entry was never going to win but the voting reveal seemed to be built around snatching victory away from him.

    I much prefer the slow drama of the full results being revealed country by country, either with a neck and neck race or just one country taking an unassailable lead – it makes the whole hour interesting rather than just the last 5 minutes. Indeed the satellite link ups revealing jury votes are now quite tedious – at least tell us who the people of the countries are voting for to give us some indication of the varying musical tastes. And it is the juries which are most politicals (Azerbaijan predictably had their jury give Russia 12 points, but the public only gave them 6).

    For me Eurovision Voting is now as dramatic as shows like Rolling with It and Game of Talents where the entire game is weighted on the final moment, making the entire hour leading up to it rather pointless.

    Reply
  3. Joey Clarke

    I think the BBC should wake up and realise that they’ve been doing the internal selection wrong.
    I think they should let me pitch a delegation to the those bureaucrats and that way, we send someone Europe will actually vote for next year in Rome, Milan, Turin, or Venice.

    Reply
  4. Greg

    The staging is also majorly important and I feel this has been as weak as the song choice for some time.

    Little effort went In to the staging this year and was arguably the poorest staging on the night.

    Also who is picking these songs and artists? James was very flat on the night. I imagine whoever was picking the song and artist heard a studio recording of the song and decided solely based on that. They need to listen to the song live before deciding.

    While there is some political voting that is absolutely not the reason we scored 0 and have been doing so badly the last few years.

    Reply
    1. Andy

      I totally agree. Our song wasn’t the worst of the night by any stretch, but the live performance was definitely one of the poorest.

      We really need to find a system that appreciates live performances. Moldova’s song wasn’t particularly great, but they were in the top half because of a decent performance.

      Sadly it looks like the BBC think there isn’t a format in a competition to select a song, even as a one night thing.

      Reply
      1. Joey Clarke

        Maybe the BBC needs to do something similar to Melodifestivalen if they decide not to go with my idea by making the selection show last three days to determine who goes to Rome next year.

        Reply
  5. David

    I don’t like the new voting either. It’d be fine if the numbers for the televote were relatively even, but the top five this year got more televote points than the other 21 countries combined and the rest of it was a bunch of obvious padding for people we knew weren’t going to do very well. Also the split voting robbed us of a legitimate Moment this year – I saw someone on Twitter work out how it would have changed if the jury and televote was combined like it used to be, and instead of being a generic tense situation like we got, Italy would have instead won by only one point.

    I’m kind of terrified to see what Italy does with the show next year, after all the improvements the Dutch made on the needlessly bloated 2019 show. The last contest they hosted in 1991 was one of the #EurovisionAgain rewatches the YouTube channel did last year, and… it may have been the worst Eurovision ever from a production standpoint. I don’t trust them not to screw it up.

    Reply
    1. Whoknows

      People keep going on about 1991 but it was literally 30 years ago. I’d be surprised if anyone at Rai who worked there at the time still worked there even 10 years ago, let alone today.

      Far smaller broadcasters than Rai have managed excellent contests in the recent past and Rai is a totally different broadcaster today than it was then. It really isn’t anything to worry about.

      And I can’t disagree more about the new voting system, truly gripping television.

      Reply
    2. Brig Bother Post author

      Well, we’ve had one contest where if you combined the votes in a different way it would have led to an exciting finish, and five which have proved gripping regardless of how the points stack up.

      I’m not quite sure what your point is here, the top jury song scored more than the bottom eleven combined – that’s just the nature of the scoring. The current system is probably the most “just” 50/50 mix they’ve ever had – if Italy did brilliantly, that’s because everyone voted for it. You can’t change the system to the one that provides the closest result on the night and on a whim, especially when more often than not, there IS no way to guarantee a close finish.

      Reply
    3. Brekkie

      Interesting, and of course as with most years since the return of the jury had the public alone been trusted to make the call we’d have had the same winner.

      Reply

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