🇪🇸 Spanish press claims Benidorm Fest regional selections underway

SPAIN – Preparations continue for the Benidorm Fest 2023, after Chanel’s brilliant third place at Eurovision 2022.

The Spanish public TV RTVE has already completed the first strategic meeting of the season and the participants are all enthusiastic.

María Eizaguirre

The first meeting of this new edition was held. We are finalizing the regulations and will soon make them available to those who want to participate.

What is cooking, however, would be much more important than the regulation itself or the possible participants.

It seems that RTVE has started a discussion with the FORTE consortium, which brings together the TVs of the Spanish regional autonomies.

FORTA (Federación de Organismos de Radio y Televisión Autonómicos) is an association founded on April 5, 1989 and is made up of public broadcasting bodies from 12 regions:

• Euskal Telebista (Basque Country)
• Televisió de Catalunya (Catalonia)
• Televisión de Galicia (Galicia)
• À Punt (Valencia)
• Canal Sur (Andalusia)
• TeleMadrid (Madrid)
• Televisión Canaria (Canary Islands)
• CMM TV (Castile – La Mancha)
• IB3 Televisió (Balearic Islands)
• Aragón TV (Aragon)
• Television of the Principado de Asturias (Asturias)
• 7 Region of Murcia (Murcia)

These television networks are in the process of announcing an “autonomic” talent show that may have the name Fortavisión.

The project is certainly not new and we already talked about it a few months ago. This format should take place in 3 phases:

• First Phase: each broadcaster selects 8 candidates for its television selection;
• Second Phase: each broadcaster broadcasts an evening in which it elects a representative for each autonomous community;
• Third Phase: the final show with the 12 winners of the broadcasters, who compete live as if it were Eurovision.

The winner would obviously be decreed with the current Eurovision voting system, that is, through the points of the regional juries and the sum of the points of the home audience.

The show could be produced by Gestmusic, a Spanish company that is part of Endemol, as has been rumoured for some time. But it wouldn’t surprise us either that it was all produced in-house by RTVE.

Spanish TV would then intend to guarantee one or two seats from the Fortavisión within the Benidorm Fest 2023.

In the RTVE strategy, this additional competition would create further attention towards the Spanish national selection, involving more public and regional musical realities.

The first autonomous TV to comment on the rumours was obviously the Valencian À Punt (remember that the Generalitat Valenciana in addition to being the owner of the TV is also one of the strategic partners of the Benidorm Fest). The president of the Generalitat Ximo Puig wants in every way to amplify the echo of Benidorm, and a regional festival organized in Benidorm or in a different location would help to pull the tow of the initiatives that are taking shape (for example the Benidorm Village).

The Fortavisión would not come out of anywhere. Some of the 12 regional TV channels are already broadcasting very popular talents, such as ‘Duel de veus’ by À Punt, ‘Tierra de talent’ on Canal Sur or ‘Jotalent’ on Aragón TV.

The road, therefore, seems to be marked and we are only waiting for the formalization by Eva Mora and María Eizaguirre.

an oikotimes original text

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