EDITORIAL – When the new voting presentation system took place, with spokespersons giving only the 8, 10 and 12th mark in the televised announcement, lots o people started to get confused. EBU thinks that giving 1-12 by each spokesperson from 40+ countries might exhaust the viewers. In the meantime counter voices claim that they barely keep up with the voting results especially if they are interested in their own country which usually is not in the top five. The system of the voting presentation is a mess anyway and now SVT’s Martin Österdahl says SVT will try to bring “fresh air” to the voting presentation.
Yes, I agree that most of the spokespersons use the voting time to mess around either by speaking in awful English, singing a song and not giving the points, or congratulating everyone (even their mom and dad) before the announcement. This is indeed a problem. But I still believe that the excitement of the voting will never be the boring part as is a totally in progress process which can alter the winner literally from voting to voting. This argument becomes stronger if we think that EBU is using the special algorithm to get the vote announcement in such an order that will not allow the final winner be revealed in the beginning of the voting (well Euphoria was the exception).
Let me now try to guess what Martin Österdahl (and his colleagues) might have in their mind: First they could skip the commentators and let the hosts announce the votes which will totally alter the image of the Eurovision Song Contest especially in the eyes of the Eurofans, not to mention that listening all the time to Petra’s voice will make me shut down the TV.
second they might get the spokespersons on stage (like in JESC) which means more expensive delegations and if one or more of them want to make a show no one will be able to stop them.
Third, we can skip the semi-finalists and allow only the countries in the final give their points in 8, 10, 12 format. Surely this will make the show easier. But this decision will mean that 18 countries will not have the chance to show their spokesperson faces on screen. Well they shouldn’t, they aren’t in he final. This decision also could allow EBU to bring back the full announcement of the votes from 1-12 as 25 country voting announcement will take almost 45-50 minutes, the usual time we used to have in the good old Eurovision days. Also, people will have the chance to understand how the votes are distributed and see each country’s ranking during the voting.
Fourth and most unacceptable idea would be to have the spokespersons announce only 12 points which will destroy the entire magic of the votes as we will all have to “shut up” in the arena, press area or even at home (impossible) so we can see what the hell is going on, on the scoreboard.
Suggestion: skip the semi-finalists by opening the scoreboard with all the results from the countries eliminated. Then start announcing in combination with the EBU algorithm the votes per country spokesperson announcing 1-12. 50 minutes is all you have. Plus give them instructions to stop clowning themselves during the voting and you will have it.
It is clear though that all changes applied in the Eurovision Song Contest the recent years were Swedish ideas which no other delegation even questioned. Let’s see what happens but we warn EBU and SVT not to stop the excitement and the anticipation and also to stop the nonsense by announcing the winner when mathematically is decided. We don’t care if it is already decided before 2-3 countries give their votes. We want to see that in the end with our own eyes after the last voting announcement.
1 comment
Sure voting system must be revamped. But not only voting system. In fact, i would like running order in old version (every counrty picks randomly a running order) instead of a system where the broadcaster chooses himself (am i the only one who thinks that system is corrupted and with no real effect on the excitement of the show). Since 3 years France is always bad ranked (2013: 1st of the 1st half, 2014: 1st of the 2nd half, 2015 2nd of the 1st half).
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