For us here at Bobbysox headquarters the semi-finals is probably the most important part of the whole Eurovision hoopla.
This will be our first look at the performance as a whole, on stage in Stockholm.
This means we'll be hard at work analyzing and reviewing all the performances of this years contest. Just for you, our lovely readers.
We will of course be watching closely and giving you our two cents about everything from song to wind machine usage.
Updates will be as close as we can get to real time. And everything happens here; on this very blog.
Sooo much to look forward to!! We can hardly wait!
Anyways...
Here's the running order of the two semifinals.
Semi-Final 1: May 10th
1. Finland
2. Greece
3. Moldova
4. Hungary
5. Croatia
6. The Netherlands
7. Armenia
8. San Marino
9. Russia
10. Czech Republic
11. Cyprus
12. Austria
13. Estonia
14. Azerbaijan
15. Montenegro
16. Iceland
17. Bosnia & Herzegovina
18. Malta
Here's an official recap of the 1.semis songs from the good people at Eurovision
Needless to say, we are rooting for Russia and the glorious Sergey Lazarev. For our thoughts on the rest of them you just have to tune in on may10th.
Semi-Final 2: May 12th
The official Eurovision web site haven't changed this order (or article) since Romania got booted , but the second semi had one contestant more than the first, so we assume that they will just throw Romania out of the order and proceed.
1. Latvia
2. Poland
3. Switzerland
4. Israel
5. Belarus
6. Serbia
7. Ireland
8. FYR Macedonia
9. Lithuania
10. Australia
11. Slovenia
12. Romania
13. Bulgaria
14. Denmark
15. Ukraine
16. Norway
17. Georgia
18. Albania
19. Belgium
And here's the recap:
The real excitement here is wether Norway's own Agnete, and her deadly dull song Icebreaker will make the cut. She's sandwiched in nicely between Ukraine and Georgia as the forth last contestant, which is good since the public might not have forgotten all about her when it's time to vote...
And Agnete, if you are reading this; Your song is only deadly dull for Eurovision purposes. Otherwise it's perfectly fine. And your outfit is FAAAAAB! (Which is, of course, very, very important)
Matt here. Of course, I don't have a dog in this fights, the UK being one of the so-called 'Big 5' along with Germany, France, Italy and Spain that don't have to qualify due to paying the the most for the annual charade. Which is a shame - going out every year in the semis might be the humiliation that broke the British camel's back, and we might start sending some decent stuff for once.
OK, so I heard that a new scoring system is being introduced to this year's Eurovision, one which the organisers say will make the competition exciting right up to the final minute.
Which, you know, we can all get behind, providing this new system continues to represent the will of the European people. We don't want to hark back to the dark days of jury-only voting, after all.
It all sounds exciting, but let's be sure. I think I need to break this new voting system down, if only for myself than for anybody else!
Now... 'Jury-televote 50/50' system
OK, as if I need to tell you, the voting system since 2009 until 2015 worked like this (let's take the UK as a working model):
Step 1 - The UK's professional jury scores ALL of the final entries awards, and awards 12, 10 and 8-1 points to the top 10 songs they choose.
Step 2 - The UK public also votes, and like the jury votes, ALL songs are ranked according to popularity. Then 12 points are awarded to the song with the highest public vote, 10 points to second highest, 8 to the third, and so on down to 1.
Step 3 - The two separate votes are then combined, and this final combined result is what is delivered when the Eurovision hosts asks the shiny British presenters for the UK votes. The UK vote is 50/50 - half 'professional jury' vote, half British public vote.
NB Interestingly, since 2013, in the event that there is a tie for a set of points in the UK's ranking, whoever wins the public vote get the points.
Anyway, by this system, the British vote is equally weighted between the 'expert' jury and the British public (actually slightly weighted in favour of the public, as it should be).
And this voting model is recreated in every country in Europe on the night, regardless of whether they have a song in the finals or not.
NB Pop fact: in 2015, Macedonia and Montenegro, for some reason, had 100% public voting. No jury involved. I tip my hat to you, sirs.
Now, I don't think jury/televote 50/50 makes for a particularly fair voting system. Can you imagine any other elections where a member of the public only get half a vote, the other half being awarded for them by unelected faceless bureaucrats? On the other hand, though, nobody ever said that Eurovision was a democracy. And besides, we all know that the public can't really be trusted with voting - just look at the rise of Donald Trump, the continued existence of the British Conservatives, and the goddamn Hungry Hearts!
Now, though, comes the revolution. The weight of Eurovision voting is about to take a huge swing to the public.
Here's the official Eurovision video to explain all
So, it works like this:
(again, using the UK as a working model)
Step 1&2 - As step 1 and 2 in the 'jury-televote 50/50'.
- BUT, the two separate votes from the UK are not combined. Instead, the public and the jury votes are kept separate, and Eurovision now has TWO rounds of voting on the night; jury vote and public vote.
Voting Round 1 Step 3 - The shiny face of the UK will pop up to present ONLY the UK jury's votes for their top 10 songs, allocating points as usual from 12, 10, 8-1.
Step 4 - The night proceeds, each country in Europe delivering ONLY their jury's votes of their top 10 songs. By the end of Voting Round 1, the table will reflect ONLY the combined results of each country's jury votes.
MEANWHILE
Step 5 - The UK public's points allocation of 12, 10, 8-1points, kept separate from the jury votes, are sent to Eurovision HQ.
Step 6 - The public points allocation from the UK are then combined with every other country's public points allocation. So if, say, Poland's song scores 12 points from the UK public and 8 from the French public, that will give Poland a combined score of 20 points from those two countries.
Every single country's public points allocation (12, 10, 8-1) is combined together; every single song will be awarded the combined points allocation from each voting country. So, theoretically, if a song was so good that it topped every public vote with the magic 12 points in all 40 participating countries, that song could well end up with a combined public score of 480 points (40x12 points) from the European public, now voting as one bloc.
And the Eurovision bods are correct. This is where it gets exciting. Ready?
Remember, atthe end of Voting Round 1, the table will reflect ONLY the combined results of each country's jury votes. Voting Round 2
Step 7 - AFTER the jury votes have finished, the Eurovision presenters will then read out the combined, Europe-wide points allocation for each and every finalist song, starting with the country that was awarded the least and working up.
Which very much means that we really won't know who has won Eurovision until the very last minute of the night, because HUGE points scores are likely to be awarded.
After Voting Round 1 asong could be sitting in 4th, 200 points behind the 1st place. But then, in Voting Round 2, the same song could be given a MASSIVE public vote of 300 points, and leaps to the top to win, right at the very death!
Talk about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat!!!
Wonderful stuff. It's going to make it difficult to predict the winner each year (although for 2016, as we have maintained since before all the countries had even picked their songs, Bobbysox is still backing Russia for the win).
The public gets a greater say in the overall result, the TV execs have us glued to their programme until the bitter end, the popular and populist songs have a better chance of winning, we all can teeter on the edge of that exhausting and nervous Eurovision excitement for that bit longer...
Ahh, Eurovision. A giant continent-wide love-in; a progressive celebration where gays, transvestites and transexuals are celebrated and loved, where for one night a year Europeans celebrate being utterly magnificent, and where fabulous solidarity spreads throughout the continent.
Despicable Me’s Felonius Gru
However, when it comes to money, it appears that trans-continental love and friendship rusts to bitter ashes in the mouths of the Eurovision directors as it emerged today that Romania has been unceremoniously booted out of 2016 ESC over unpaid debts.
Romania's public broadcaster Televizunea Romana (TVR) is said to have unpaid debts from the past 5 years owed to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). You can read the full statement here.
As a result, the Geneva-based EBU (yeah, it would be based in Switzerland, wouldn't it? Because no financial skullduggery ever happened in Switzerland ahem nazi gold ahem) withdrew membership services to TVR.
All of which means a few things
- The Eurovision feed will be blocked to Romania so no Romanians will be able to watch the ESC semi finals or the finals.
- The Romanian entry to the 2016 Eurovision contest, Ovidiu Anton's admittedly lumpen Moment of Silence, has been pulled from the 2016 contest.
- Romanians won't be able to vote, nor will the Eurovision Copenhagen hosts be handing over to Bucharest for the results of the Romanian jury.
- And the EBU are threatening further sanctions, including blocking the broadcast to Romania of this year's football Euro Championships and even the bloody Olympics. Oh, and presumably Junior Eurovision.
Which is a crying shame for Ovidiu, throwing his best Despicable Me shapes over the past few months, and even more so for the great Romanian people. Because of financial mismanagement of a few TV execs (possibly the Government, also), through absolutely no fault of their own millions of Romanians will miss the glorious ESC.
Talk about collective punishment - isn't that against the European Convention of Human Rights? Article 3 of the ECHR clearly states that "collective punishment is inconsistent with the general principles of international law", not to mention the EBU also contravening Article 6 (fair trial, which the Romanian people haven't had) and Article 7 (no punishment without law). After all, what use are they if a person (Romanian) can be sentenced without being personally accused?!
So come on EBU. What do you have to say to *those* charges? Hmmm? Nothing? Yeah, thought so.
Anyway, here's the middling Romanian effort that we're all banned from seeing in Eurovision now.
And a slow handclap for the EBU executives all around, please.
All dressed up and nowhere to go?
Well, we have the completely opposite problem...
We have somewhere to go, (a fabulous ESC party, of course) and nothing to wear.. And as you may have gotten by now, we can hardly afford staying alive so we definitely can't afford new fab outfits.
We could always opt for our oddly similar everyday uniform, stripey shirt and jeans, but let's not kid ourselves... That's not nearly sparkly enough for Eurovision.
Luckily...perhaps... I have been binge watching RuPauls Drag Race lately. This has turned out to be a bit of a double edged sword, to be honest.
On the one hand my love and need for over the top-glamour have gone through the roof. This will make it difficult to find an outfit to suit my new very hight standards of fab.
On the other hand it has also made me quite confident that I can just throw together some fabric and make something unique and catwalk worthy in no time.
So that's exactly what I plan on doing.
I mean, what could go wrong? I have a sewing machine, foolhardiness and a great Turkish market in my neighbourhood, where they have super cheap, fantastic sequin fabrics. CHECK CHECK CHECK!!!
So the plan is to make us matching outfits from this fabric. A tad campy, but hey! Isn't Eurovision (at least the best bits) as campy as it gets?!?
Matt's getting a waistcoat with a sequin Union Jack on the back,
and I'm making a kind of onesie for myself.
I have decided to start with my outfit, just in case I'm not as good a seamstress as I think... That way I am my own guinea pig and if something goes completely wrong no one will know (cause I'll be hiding it under huuuuuuge accessories)
In the long tradition of eccentric weirdness in Eurovision, this year's crown probably goes to Ivan, Belarus' 2016 entry.
In earlier rounds of the contest he sang his entry, Learn to Fly, naked, with wolves. Yep, with wolves. Wolves that quite often would take a quick nip at the loon.
Of course, taking the fun out of life since forever, health and safety guidelines stipulate that no live animals are allowed on stage, circa Eurovision rule 1.2.2a. So we're definitely not going to see any live wolves stalking the Eurovision stage in Stockholm.
Boooo.
Sadly, the lumpen song doesn't quite match the thrill of being eaten alive by a wolf. Also, 'Learning to Fly'? If your whole schtick is that you're some kind of wolfman, friend of the wolves, then surely your song should be more canine, something like 'Learning to Run', or 'Learning to Howl', or 'Learning to be Reintroduced to Scotland to Scare the Bejeesus out of Some Poor Walkers Sometime Pretty Soon' (Note: Everyone seems to agree that reintroducing wolves to Scotland is a 'good thing'. But I like being the top of the food chain in the UK. We are voluntarily ceding our place as kings of the country. Has nobody stopped to think about that, eh? No. They haven't.)
Anyhow, let's have a look at a few of my favourite more eccentric offerings from Eurovision over the years.
2008. Dustin the Turkey (Ireland) - Irelande Douze Pointe
Of course, we must start with Ireland's brilliantly subversive 2008 offering from Dustin the Turkey, Irelande Douze Pointe - the year the good people of Ireland just threw up their hands and said 'Bugger Eurovision. This is amazing.' (Full lyrics here)
Sadly, Europe didn't agree, and Dustin never made it out of the semi finals, but his song will always be one of my absolute favourites - 'Give us another chance. We're sorry for Riverdance. Michael Flatley, he's a yank. The Danube flows through France.'
One for the kids here. Although I don't remember this next song, being aged one as I was, it's in Eurovision folklore, not least because it's the first Eurovision song to namecheck the contest itself.
Euro-Vision was performed by po-faced Belgian band Telex, rocking a sort of Eurovision-friendly Kraftwerk. The whole song is a send-up of Eurovision, which itself is novel, post-irony not really having been invented in 1980. The performance is relentlessly and purposelessly dull, the main singer clearly recognising Eurovision for the nonsense it is, standing as a contrast to the standard shiny teeth-tastic Eurovision cheesefest, although the synchronised swaying of Telex is mesmeric. The song itself is quite catchy, but quite why they didn't somehow weave into the song the sound of a telex printer crunching out a witty Eurovision message is unknown. Definite trick missed, there.
They came second last in the finals (no semi-finals in those days), the band explaining 'We had hoped to finish last, but Portugal decided otherwise. We got ten points from them and finished on the 19th spot.’
My hat off to you, sir.
1998, Guildo Horn (Germany) - Guildo Hat Euch Liebe
Next up, the balding menace of Guildo Horn, Germany's 1998 entry, Guildo hat euch lieb (Guildo Loves You).
Prancing around like your ale-bothering uncle at a wedding, Guildo attempts to tunelessly seduce Europe with some stage managed 'chaos'. Off he goes into the audience (wild!), jumps back on stage to play with his bells (mad!) before back into the crowd with a wild abandon (crazy!). And then, oh my god, there he goes, climbing the furniture, hanging from the rafters like a gurning King King, if King Kong played in a 1970s prog rock pub band, the glare from his bald spot blinding the audience.
Amazingly, Guildo finished a commendable 9th in 1998, proving, as if proof were needed, that all laws - music, style, performance - are suspended in the Eurovision bubble.
2006, LT United (Lithuania) - We Are the Winners of Eurovision
I absolutely loved Lithuania's extraordinary postmodern entry into the 2006 Eurovision: LT United, with We Are the Winners of Eurovision.
A basic song, with a not so subtle message repeated throughout. Yeah, so far, so fairly original.
But, of course, a song structured like that is going to fall a bit flat without something spectacular. They needed something to put in the middle eight, and you can almost imagine the production meeting from when they were coming up with the song:
'Ok guys. It's basically the same chant over and over, which is great and all, but I'm worried about the bit in the middle where nobody sings. It could all get a bit flat. Suggestions?'
Everyone chews their pens looking thoughtfully, until suddenly someone hesitantly raises their hand. 'How about we just put a little bald guy on the end of the line, who does nothing all song, then during the dull bit he steps forward and dances like a fucking maniac for 30 seconds or so while a guy with a violin squeals at the audience. Then he can just do a brilliant Python-style walk back to his place, and the song just carries on as if nothing weird just happened.'
And lo, it came to pass. Lordii won in 2006, of course, but brilliantly the ghoul rockers played their rocking version of We Are the Winners at the Eurovision afterparty. I would pay a good few sheckles to have been there for that.
Lithuania finished a commendable 6th with this effort.
2013, Igranka (Montenegro) - Who See
So, because I love all things space, a special mention to Montenegro's 2013 entry, Who See, a sort of hip hop/house hybrid, by trio Igranka.
Absolutely full marks firstly for singing in their own language (I only assume it's their language, mind. I can only be sure that it ain't English), but bonus points for the two blokes spending the entire performance in a pretty convincing NASA spacesuits (complete with Montenegro flag patch on the arm, of course). Add in the female vocalist wearing a Borg-like head piece and a see-through proton pack, and it turned into an almighty psychedelic space rave.
The rapping is pretty bobbins, but when the Borg takes over vocal duties, erupting onto the stage like a goddamn Apollo rocket, the song explodes into the stars, and the two blokes have nothing left to do except lurch around wonderfully like they were on the bloody moon. Superb.
They finished 12th in 2013, which rightly represents Montenegro's highest ever Eurovision finish.
One of Ida's favourites here, and included simply for it's sheer nuttery, brilliance, enthusiasm, flippancy and...Eurovisiony exuberance. It Austria's 2007 entry, Dancing Lasha Tumbai, by Verka Serduchka.
There's too much awesome in these three minutes to possibly fit in here: the unashamedly spangly outfits; that star on her head; the subtle weaving of traditional germanic accordion folkmusic (ha!) to uproarious disco; the cross-generations all squeezed into sequins, the number 69 (of course) gleaming proudly on the back of Verka's top, the heroic, gender-bending backing dancers, and everything switched up to 11 - if all Eurovision entries had the same sprawling ambition and infinite vision as Dancing Lasha Tumbai, the competition would eat the world.
Scandalously, this only finished second in 2007. SECOND! And you know what to? No? Exactly!
I wish Verka was my grandma. Or grandpa. I'm easy, you know?
As an aside, Verka and Dancing Lasha Tumbai make a very funny cameo in the the 2015 film, Spy.
2006, Lordi (Finland) - Hard Rock Hallelujah
Finally, the grandaddy of entries. When glorious eccentricity, outlandish outfits, targeted pyrotechnics, and an absolutely cracking song all combine to create the perfect storm of Eurovision brilliant oddity - of course, it's Lordi, with Finland's 2006 entry, Hard Rock Hallelujah.
No more to be said. To me, this will never, ever be beaten in the annals of Eurovision. Lordi can take their rightful place on the Eurovision royal throne next to Abba, Johnny Logan, Diva International, Conchita Wurst, Bucks Fizz and the rest.
I bow down, as ever, to Lordi. Hallelujah, indeed.
