Alright gang, I’ve opened up a page on the upcoming series of The Genius starting next month. It’s an all-star season, which is good going considering there’s only been three and half the cast in S2 were in S1. Still, though.

1000 Heartbeats is getting an extended second run in the Autumn. Well they’re saying extended, it’s thirty episodes (the original was meant to be thirty but re-edited into twenty-five so God knows).

Enjoyed the first series in the main, hopefully the second one will improve on it. We discussed the first series here.

The most amusing thing is somewhere at Hungry Bear there’s a junior researcher crying into his hands at the prospect of having to come up with another 90 heart-related questions for the ad breaks.

In other news, Never Mind the Buzzcocks has been axed.

No I haven’t forgotten:

Up for the Memorial Day holiday, although American Ninja Warrior managed a 1.8. Tonight’s the first time the show faces proper competition (i.e. not re-runs on the other channels) in the form of America’s Got Talent and the new Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader on Fox. Right now it’s riding high on a champion who is almost up to 150 questions – it’s taken three episodes to get there, if the audience sticks with it after the crash out (if it happens) then I’d have to concede it’s not quite a flop. But really not a success, let’s be honest.

So there was quite a lot (some) of talk last night on the Eurovision algorithm. This was introduced a few years ago to inject some excitement into voting by making it look as if it was wide open for as long as possible.

How does it work? The Friday before the Grand Final they do a dress rehearsal for the main show on Saturday, and it’s this dress rehearsal the forty national juries watch and mark. This mark accounts for 50% of each country’s points allocation – it works a bit like Strictly Come Dancing, the countries are ranked by jury and ranked by the televote, the rankings combined and the top ten are given the points.

The computer whirrs away overnight to come up with the most exciting deliverance of votes possible based solely on the jury vote. This is released on Saturday morning (this means they can finalise a running order/cue-cards and so on).

If the votes from this year’s jury finals were the only ones used, this is how the final voting would go:

As you can see it’s nip and tuck until the 27th set of votes are released which is where Sweden have more than a 12 point lead and then continue to pull away. If the results were given in a completely random order you would expect the gradients to be a bit more fixed, and it would look like Sweden are the winners from much earlier.

However the interest for me is how does the televote affect the result of the algorithm? This is how the results would have played out on the night if the comms didn’t break down:

The pull-away point here is around result 32, the televote added literally 6-7 minutes more excitement and interest. Particularly interesting is that again, if the results were given in a random order you’d expect Sweden to look like clear winners earlier, but because the viewers disagree with the juries Russia pulls well ahead until the jury advantage kicks back in to the Swede’s favour. There will have to be a point where the losers fade away.

Where the public agree with the juries you’d expect it to feel all over a lot earlier, but clearly when there’s a bit of disagreement you get a rather exciting night like last night.

You can check the working on the Excel spreadsheet I made. Euroalgorithm

It’s the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final tonight!

It starts at 8pm in the UK, you can watch it on BBC1 with Graham Norton commentating and Nigella Lawson giving the UK results (also Ken Bruce on Radio 2).

Alternatively for international (or indeed UK viewers) you can watch the whole thing live on eurovision.tv or this year on Youtube.

Watch as the UK entry Electro Velvet STORMS to a towards-the-bottom placed finish.

I thought of something quite funny a while ago, the Four Stages of Eurovision Grief. Unfortunately this afternoon I forgot one of the stages so I’ve had to improvise and I’m not sure how much I like it, so consider this a “work-in-progress” “gag”.

• There is definitely no political voting in the ESC.
• Look, it’s not political, it’s all about a shared culture – The Russian song is so intrinsically Russian all their neighbours will feel like voting for it.
• Look, it is a song contest.
• Yeah well, Ireland always give us points every year so stop complaining.

I don’t really care who wins, I do have a little bit of money riding on the UK doing quite badly (the reasons people have given for why the UK might do quite well are faintly astonishing, “it’s quaint so the Europeans will love it” is amusingly patronising and “it’s upbeat so it’s memorable in a sea of ballads” doesn’t automatically mean anyone’s going to pick up the phone for it, it’s also fifth in a running order of twenty-seven).

We shall see.

500 Questions starts tonight! And as the US’ big new event show that’s already had loads of interest from other countries despite not having aired anything and aiming to redefine the gameshow genre (a bit like Million Second Quiz two years ago) we’re paying close attention to the numbers. With THE TERRIFYING DEMOGRAPHIC DRAGON. Will Quest complete the quest, or will he BURN?

We’ll be updating this over the next week or so – it’s the first tonight, a double-episode tomorrow, one on Friday, then repeats on Saturday and Sunday, and then on nightly next week, finishing on a double.

I’m going to be a bit behind with watching it (because of work commitments this week, aggravatingly), I’ve been down on it from ever since hearing about it (it sounds like Quizzlestick, the prizes feel a bit cheap, crucially it’s going to be much slower paced than necessary).

I think it might do OK this evening on ABC as new hyped shows invite a watch (although it is up against the Survivor: World’s Apart live final on CBS, a show that’s proven tremendously resiliant over 30 seasons, and there’s the added bonus of the results of a live vote to determine which previous contestants will play the next All-Star losers season), the killer is that being slow paced, if someone gets to question 60-70+ and then loses, is the average viewer bothered enough to sit through another two or three episodes to get up to a point where it’s going to be in any way tense (and even then a graphic that suggests ’60/500′ looks like too much effort to expend for not enough reward)? I predict not, and I would expect a large drop off when the first contestant eventually gets knocked out. It’s very difficult to do endurance as a quiz show in a way that keeps viewers.

Here’s the Buzzerblog review.