We’ve had a lot of discussions on our Juke Box Jury shows about “the jury” and how they are going to vote, but when Eurovision fan Howard Atkinson grabbed us on IM to point out the flawed thinking, there was only one thing to do. Ask him to write it up in full for everyone to discuss!
More than a few eyebrows were raised last May when the two overall televote and jury votes of the Eurovision Song Contest Final were made public. Most comment focused on certain individual discrepancies between the two sets of figures: Italy, Austria and Slovenia had finished in the top 5 with the juries, but they had fared dramatically worse with televoters; the UK and Russia had suffered a similar fate, but in reverse. And how could one explain the fact Evelina Sasenko’s Lloyd-Webberish power ballad for Lithuania had finished only 20th with the juries in the Final despite having won in its Semi-Final jury vote? All very strange.
There was one minor detail tucked away in those figures that struck me as especially odd and which nobody appeared to have noticed (or maybe it was just that most other people had better things to do with their time than analyse the the minutiae of Eurovision score sheets). My beloved Icelandic entry, “Coming Home” by Sjonni’s Friends, had finished a disappointing 20th, one place behind the Lithuanian song. Yet in both the overall jury vote and the televote, it had finished ahead of it . This made no sense to me, but I put it to the back of my mind as I packed away my Eurovision memories for another year and consoled myself with the fact that I’d made a tidy profit backing Azerbaijan and Italy, and at least Stereo Mike hadn’t won…
Evalina Sasenko
With the blogosphere now awash with speculation, forecast and rumour ahead of this year’s show, I find myself returning to that puzzling little voting quirk of 2011. And I think I may have chanced upon something quite intriguing, which could well have dramatic implications for this year’s contest. I am no statistical genius, but I think the explanation of my Iceland/Lithuania conundrum may lie in the fact that there is actually no such thing as a monolithic overall jury vote or televote; depending on the number of countries competing, there are 40 or so individual jury votes and the same number of individual televotes, which are then combined in a quite specific country-by-country way to produce one overall result. In other words, although the overall televoting and jury results may make interesting reading in retrospect for Eurovision addicts like me, they do not actually reflect the way the scores are put together and calculated on the night.
If my admittedly unscientific analysis is correct, then I believe that this could have a decisive impact on this year’s result, much more significant than Sjonni’s Friends’ failure to leapfrog over Sasenko’s twin peaks last May.
Inevitably, it concerns the spanners in this year’s works, Russia’s Buranovskiye Babushki. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read comments from fans along the lines of “the grannies will romp the televote, but they’ll do so badly with the juries that they won’t win”.
Although I understand the general sentiment, I suspect it is actually based on a false premise – that of the monolithic jury vote. Now, there is little doubt in my mind that the Grannies will be an enormous hit with televoters from Reykjavik to Chisinau in various stages of inebriation.
Will the judges think as one?
In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if they won around half of the forty televotes (i.e. the forty two entered countries minus San Marino, who I believe use only a jury, and Russia itself). If that were to happen, they would end up getting a large number of 6s, 7s and 8s even if every jury placed them outside the top ten. Don’t forget that, in the event of a tie in a country’s vote, the televote takes precedence over the jury vote. Factor in certain individual jurors and juries falling for the geriatric charms of the Babushki, and I reckon you have a recipe for a quite comfortable victory. And if on the night the grannies start picking up a few early 12s, it can surely only mean one thing – not all of the juries are having the impact that many have predicted, and a landslide may even be on the cards.
All of this might, of course, be as wide of the mark as an arrow from Guy Tell’s crossbow. I’m no guru, and it’s the unpredictability of Eurovision that makes it so appealing. But I do think that I have perhaps hit on a factor that many fans have overlooked. Although “Party For Everybody” hardly represents the pinnacle of song writing sophistication, I for one would love to see the Grannies win.
And I doubt the juries will have the collective power to stop them.
Howard Atkinson works as an English teacher and translator at Weimar University:
“For many years, I had my own regular radio show in Weimar, the highlight of which was always the annual Eurovision Special. “I’ve been a Eurovision fan for as long as I can remember, my first Eurovision memory being Clodagh Rodgers in her pink hot-pants in 1971. I’ve attended three contests: Copenhagen 2001, Helsinki 2007 and Düsseldorf 2011. Favourite song? If pushed, I’d go for ‘Rapsodia’ (Italy 1992) or ‘Vi Maler Byen Rød‘ (Denmark 1989).”
Let me give you a few examples from last year’s final:
Denmark = Televote: 18th, Jury: 3rd, Overall: 5th
Russia = Televote: 7th, Jury: 25th, Overall: 16th
Slovenia = Televote: 22nd, Jury: 4th, Overall: 13th
United Kingdom = Televote: 5th, Jury: 22nd, Overall: 11th
Greece = Televote: 3rd, Jury: 14th, Overall: 7th
I think you’ve underestimated the juries’ influence on results, or fail to understand how they work.
What if televoters will not support grannies enough? Balkans will give douze points for their neighbors and so will Scandinavia. But perhaps the juries this time might back up Russia, you never know. We don’t know who are the jurors and what are their musical tastes.
The victory is determined by how well a certain song will do with both juries and televoters. If last year Italy would get 150 points with televoters or Azerbaijan would score only 100 points from jurors, Eurovision 2012 would probably be in Rome. If Eric Saade would earn just 5 more points from televotes, he would win the televote but the winner would most likely still be Azerbaijan!
Place number by itself doesn’t matter – what matters is the amount of points awarded by each party.
Dimitry – I think we are closer to agreeing than you think . . . As I said in my article, it’s the unpredictability of Eurovision that I love. But I think my point is still something to bear in mind, who knows?
This is far from a strange phenomena, like many things in Eurovision a look at how political voting works can explain this the concept.
In an election with more than one constituency it is possible for one candidate to win a fairly good percentage of the votes overall but not do well enough in any individual constituency to win. One of the key parts of constituency voting, it favours those who are strong in regional areas over the larger area.
In Eurovision, its about how a song combines jury an televoting, a song that picks up say 2 points from 40 juries will leave in a nicely with 80 points from the juries. However if the song had 0 on the public vote it probably wouldn’t combine well, and would end up just missing out on points from all the juries. Last year Jedward came 8th with 119 points, and got 119 points from the juries, but only 101 points from the public. This is an example of points combining well together.
In the case of Russia, the average number of points awarded from the televote to the winning song in the last 3 contests per country was almost 7 points. If Russia scored an average of 7 points from the televote, and 2 from the jury my extremely rough excel calculations (serious health warning with these) would suggest they will have about 197 points, if the jury vote was raised to 5 points and the number of televotes was still seven then they could score in the region of 279 points, which is a very high number of points. But once again these are extremely rough.
One thing no one has pointed out is that the juries don’t vote in the same show as the televoters, which I’ve always found incredibly unfair. I think part of the discrepancies in 2011 for the UK and Russia were down to bad vocal performances in the “jury final”. It would be fairer if everyone voted on the same performance and that way the juries could gauge the crowd’s enthusiasm for each song.
I agree that in countries Russia gets the 12 televote, this could still translate into 6/7/8 points in some cases, but I don’t actually believe they will get enough televote 12s to overcome the slaughtering they’ll get from the juries. They’ll get them from their friends, but they’re not going to get them from e.g. the Balkan countries who will all be voting for Serbia, or the Nordics who will all be going for Sweden. If Russia consistently only get 7s and 8s on the televote, it won’t be enough.
Another thing to factor in is how much disagreement there is between the juries and televoters on the other fancied entries. Last year there was huge disagreement, which meant just getting high votes from one or the other was enough to do well. But if the likes of Serbia and Sweden do well on both (which I think they will), doing well on televotes OR juries alone might not be enough this year, like it almost was last year for Italy.
@ Stephen – Problem is, if the juries voted on the same live show the public did, it would take forever to them to collect their votes together and send them off to whoever tallies up the scores.
I still don’t understand why we need juries at all. Very obviously, they are miles away from the public’s taste and manipulate the score in favour of dreadfully boring, clichéd ballads that nobody wants, voting down popular uptempo songs. This is exactly what costed the contest it’s reputation and credibility back in the 80s and early 90s.
I am pretty sure that sooner or later we will see the first televoting winner not winning the overall vote because of the juries – and here’s hoping we’ll get finally rid of them then!
@Aufrechtgehen. One argument in favour of juries having a 50% say is that they are, in theory at least, more objective. Televoters don’t even have to listen to all the songs, and some years it has been possible to vote for a song before it’s been heard, which is ridiculous.
@ Aufrechtgehen, we have juries now due to, when they were removed, the rather obvious political voting. Basically, Russia winning with Believe.
Surely the rules exist precisely to maintain credibility, and if they don’t do so, they are changed.
Also, the Eurovision brand distinguishes itself from others by going slightly against mob rule. If it didn’t, then no-one would bother entering anything off-formula. We already have pop charts and internet memes for that.
I think you all have a point – in the 90’s the 100% jury system lost the contest some credibility when “The Voice” won ahead of Gina G’s mega-hit. Equally, the block and diaspora voting threatened the credibility of the contest in 2007 and 2008, for example. The current 50/50 mix seems about as good a compromise as you’re ever going to get, and, as Zolan suggests, it makes the Eurovision brand unique.
The other thing which, I think, sets the ESC apart from other shows such as Pop Factor, X Idol and Has Britain Got Any Talent? is that it only comes round once a year and is thus a special international event. Long may it continue!!!
I think The Voice beating Gina G is not the only example of juries voting for a technically good song over a pop song. I just think that it’s the one the sticks out in British peoples heads.
One your other point Howard, I think that the Critical Success Factor to Eurovision [you’d know I have a management exam in the morning] is that the producers have no say over the inputs into the show. Shows like Britains Got Talent, X-Factor or even Melodifestivalen have are heavily influenced by what the producers want in the show, what they believe will make it a success. Eurovision depends on broadcasters through out Europe to send something original and fresh to the show and the producers just have to accept what the broadcaster comes up with. Also Eurovision brings together the collaborative efforts of heads of delegations [who generally are TV execs or producers] to produce a massive show.