And that was your National Final season. It’s all over, we have our song, now it’s a matter of getting everything ready for two weeks in May, and then making sure it’s all right on the night. Still, what just happened?
This Week’s Results
The long and entertaining Azerbaijan selection process has come to an end, and the first male soloist to represent the Land of Fire will be Farid Mammadova, with power ballad ‘Hold Me’.
The final National Final was broadcast from Moldova, and Aliona Moon will take the song ‘A Million’ to Malmo in May. She topped the jury vote, and came second in the public vote. Reports that she is the sister of Alfie Moon from Eastenders will be investigated by Terry Vision.
While not strictly speaking the weekend, RAI has confirmed the entry for Italy will be ‘L’Essenziale’, performed by Marco Mengoni. Following Italy’s return to the Contest, the ESC representative has been selected from the San Remo performers – and this is the first year the overall winner of San Remo will be going to Eurovision (Raphael Gualazzi was the winner of the Giovani newcomers section, not the overall Contest).
This Week’s Presentations And Switcheroos
It’s not just National Finals that have revealed the songs, there has been a little rush on presentations of songs, and some countries changing their minds as to their entry.
Montenegro revealed a genuine dub-step song for Who See, while most of The Netherlands are convinced that Anouk is going to bring the Contest back to Amsterdam. Meanwhile San Marino have returned to Valentina Monetta, except they’ve handed her two really good songs – rather than choose either of them, they’ve slammed the two together to create ‘Crisalide’.
Two countries have switched their entries – Bulgaria have ran into copyright issues with ‘Kismet’ so the song that finished second (and the one that Elitsa and Stoyan preferred), namely ‘Shamo Shampioni’ will go to Sweden.
And finally on the name front the band ‘Heilsarmee’ from Switzerland are now ‘The Artists Known As Salvation Army’, unless you ask officially, in which case ‘Takasa’ is the acronym.
Finally France debuted their song on Spotify, and ‘L’Enfer Et Moi’ is clearly a gallic number!
News From the Heads of Delegation Meeting
With the submission deadline now closed, the Heads of Delegation meeting in Malmo received all 39 entries, and went over a number of details about the Contest, including some rather nice CGFI renders of the stage, and announcing that the running order for the two semi-finals will be announced on March 29th.
Where’s Wally?
Also, the rules around the running order have been tweaked. Rather than being completely at the whim of the producers, countries in the Grand Final on May 18th will draw for which half of the Final they are in, either the top half or the bottom half (which is already done, albeit for logistical reasons, in the semi-finals).
While it’s not the return of a fully random draw that many fans were hoping for, it is a (slight) improvement. Given that the ESC Insight team suggested countries should draw into ‘top, middle, or bottom thirds’ of the draw when the rule change came out (), it’s nice to see that wiser heads at Eurovision are making a solid case.
Adult Eurovision is now very close to the model used to determine the running order at the Junior Eurovision Song Contest. There’s still time to add the last rule JESC uses, which is to randomly choose the country that opens and closes the Contest – arguably the spots which have the most influence.
The exception to the running order process is the host country, who draw their running spot at random to provide an air of fairness. Sweden will be singing 16th on the night – a slot that just like 2nd has never won in the history of the Song Contest.
Provisional dates for the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 were also announced. Pencil in May 13th and May 15th for the Semi-Finals, and May 17th for the Grand Final.
Anyone brave enough to book a hotel yet?
Coming Up This Week
Do we still need this section? Oh well, here we go.
- The Heads of Delegation finish in Malmo tonight. So they’re probably in the pub by the time you read this.
- Here on ESC Insight we’ll be starting our previews on Friday, with the return of Juke Box Jury. As well as some familiar judges, we’ve been recruiting Eurovision experts (and performers) from further afield, so we can go through every song and rate them Hit, Miss, or Maybe.
Coming Up Later in April
But this would be a good time to point out two of the big Preview Parties happening in April, where you’ll have a chance to meet the Eurovision performers and hear them sing live before the big night in May.
- Eurovision In Concert (www.eurovisioninconcert.nl)
Saturday April 13th, Amsterdam - London Eurovision Party (www.londoneurovision.com)
Sunday April 21st, London.
Where’s Wally? He’s the one stood at the back middle, hiding behind his devil horns and evil maniacal grin. Oh no, that’s just Christer! Although his plans for the stage do look excellent, so he isn’t going to totally wreck the contest with his unnecessary changes. 😀
Can’t wait for JBJ to start up again, they were one of the highlights of last year.
Very excited for Juke Box Jury! Love it every year…
I’m glad the EBU did something about the running order issue before the contest. Let’s hope they will go on improving the rules afterwards.
The decision to go straight for high producer control seems to have been a strategic success already, as any future refinements will likely be in the other direction and pass with little objection.
I’ve been thinking they could go further than JESC (which incidentally, might yeild an unsuitable opening song):
– Draw into thirds (perhaps using pots to avoid bad draws).
– Plan the running order of each third.
– Then draw the order of thirds.
That preserves the official rationale for manual intervention, but also removes some dilemmas that the producers might not want to be responsible for, as well as weakening the range of objections that can be levelled after the fact.
Roll on JBJ.
Was the HoD meeting held in an old school building? The picture looks like it’s missing a cheesy bride and groom in the middle.
Zolan, if you use the segmentation approach in a way as complicated as you do, I don’t think it’s still a good idea. Consider the transitions between the segments: you can choose either to disregard them when designing the running order, or to take any possible transition into account. The cyclic approach seems much easier then.
@Z. It’s not complicated in practice. Each section can be like a railcar; you don’t need to know the order as long as the front and back are compatible. And it is much easier to implement 3 small sections with predetermined entries that one containing all entries. And 3!=6 is not many arrangements if you want to check them all before submission. The final ‘draw’ is a single roll of the die.
Compared with the cyclic approach, this variant reduces producers’ freedom about which particular songs are near each other, as well as allowing them to determine what style to start and end with, while still maintaining short term contour and variation. It seems like a pretty good deal to me.