So.
What an unmitigated
omnishambles. I don't know if there's ever been a Eurovision Song
Contest so full of self-inflicted unforced errors at literally every
level. Not the time they wanted to Celebrate Diversity by making
three white dudes the hosts, or the time Latvia forgot to record half
the postcards, or the entirety of the Toto Cotugno Experience
(allora). Never has Eurovision been so broken. And as this year's
winner Nemo said, maybe Eurovision needs a little bit of fixing. So
what can be done to fix it? Shockingly I, a person on the internet,
have ideas. We'll start with the obvious one.
1. New Leadership at
the EBU
At every single possible
opportunity (and several seemingly impossible opportunities) in the
leadup to the Grand Final, the European Broadcasting Union failed to
act with the welfare of its most important figures, the contestants
themselves, as their utmost priority. We are constantly hearing that
this is the biggest live music event in the world, and yet, over the
past decade it has been turned into a big budget version of a
sadistic 2000s reality TV spectacle.
That is not the fault of a
single person or a single broadcaster (indeed, the single person many
in the contest fandom have blamed for most of these gradual changes
in the past, Swedish producer Christer Bjorkman, was likely the very
person who saved Eurovision with a running order this year that was
atypical in the places it needed to be); however, it is symptomatic
of a rot within the union that has seeped into every aspect of the
production. The positions of all of the people in positions of
oversight at the EBU is now completely untenable. However, there are
three in particular who need singling out due to the nature of their
roles.
First and most obviously
is the Executive Supervisor of the contest, Martin Österdahl.
Whatever failings were on display during the contest – and there
were too many to list here, to the point it was not implausible to
suggest that at minimum half of the nations competing would be
completely logical withdrawals next year, even before the annual
quibbles from less well-off countries about affording the entry fees
– they all rest at his feet. He is the public face of the contest,
and it is abundantly clear that the public have no faith in him after
this mess. There is no way for the contest to recover while is in any
way involved with it. (Also, the next Executive Supervisor needs to
care a hell of a lot less about building up their own personal legend
to the point of approving a musical number about how sexy they are,
and more about doing the job competently. Thanks in advance.)
Second, EBU Director
General Noel Curran. It may be harder for Noel to vanish entirely,
being married to 1996 winner Eimear Quinn, but he was never an
incredibly public face as it was. However, during the leadup to the
final this year he was interviewed by host broadcaster SVT about the
myriad ongoing complaints with this year's Israeli delegation and
claimed the EBU “saw that Israel's TV company had not broken any of
the EBU's rules regarding the competition”. This is indefensible.
The only two ways to read this statement are that either he and the
EBU were too ignorant to see the repeated and brazen flouting of the
contest's publicly available rules that the Israeli delegation was
taking part in, in which case they are unfit for their jobs, or the
EBU knew that Israel was breaking the rules without abandon and
actively did nothing, putting the other contestants and delegations
at repeated risk, in which case they are unfit for their jobs. The
additional concerns about the contest's main sponsor being an Israeli
company who may have been pressuring them behind the scenes are
irrelevant. Under his watch, the people he had a duty of care were
repeatedly endangered. He must go.
But it's not just the in
person care that's an issue. A huge part of why the particular
situation with this year's Dutch entrant, Joost Klein, was so
catastrophic was the complete and utter silence from the EBU
throughout as the story was developing. With the heightened emotions
of this year's contest, more than ever the communication needed to be
clear, concise, and clarifying. We got none of that, allowing social
media to run rampant with speculation ranging from fanciful to
outright defamatory; instead, we got a breathless Twitter post about
the latest reunion of 2000s pop group Alcazar for one of the
intervals (more on the intervals later). It would be bad enough in
the hands of a career social media manager. But a few years ago, the
social media presence of one of the world's biggest events was taken
over by British journalist Rob Holley, a man whose relevant expertise
appears to have largely been “got a terminally online fandom to
rewatch things at a time when nobody could leave their house”.
(Yes, this is as stupid as it sounds.) To put it bluntly, the EBU was
wholly unprepared to have to do crisis control for an event where
skills for crisis control are an essential part of the job. It's time
for a new approach led by new people.
2. Ban Israel from the
Contest
Once the EBU has new
management, the first thing that must be done is the single thing
that could have been done months ago to prevent the contest bringing
itself into disrepute in the first place: banning Israel from
entering while it is committing a genocide (as implicated by the
International Court of Justice and visible to anyone with even a
passing awareness of the news). The usual lies and excuses that the
Israeli broadcaster doesn't represent Israel as a whole are just
that, lies and excuses. The graphics show national flags, not
broadcaster logos. Greece has never given twelve points to the Cyprus
Broadcasting Corporation. Belgium doesn't get two entries every year
because it has two broadcasters. It is a blatant and unconscionable
attempt at gaslighting the audience because the EBU is too lazy,
incompetent, compromised, or all three to take any meaningful action.
Even if you were to come
up with a heretofore unseen logic that makes the “but broadcasters
are not countries!” schtick explanation palatable to the vast
majority of the viewing public (in which case why haven't you done it
by now), the fact remains that the members of the Israeli delegation
this year broke so many of the contest's fundamental rules so
frequently and so blatantly and so unafraid of consequences that it
is clear they are likely to do so again if given another opportunity.
We also have what appears to be strong evidence of attempts to rig
the televote from the same country. They have proven they cannot be
trusted to behave in the contest setting, and it has happened several
times over recent years. It's time for the EBU to admit it's too much
hassle. Get rid.
3. Reference Group
Composition
The priority when staging
Eurovision must be making the event as safe as possible for the
delegations involved. Currently, the EBU Reference Group that handles
the decision making processes with the Executive Supervisor is made
entirely of television producers. That's fine in moderation, but one
of the key priorities must be ensuring the welfare of acts and their
delegations, rather than solely producing a television program at the
expense of those required to make the program happen, as has clearly
been the case in this and other recent years. The way to fix this is
simple: add an extra one or two people to the reference group each
year who were former Eurovision contestants and know what needs to be
done to handle those sorts of issues. The group meets only a handful
of times a year. Having an extra person sit in on a Zoom call every
couple of months is not going to be prohibitively expensive. There
are certainly other issues as well – the current members of the
Reference Group skew overwhelmingly towards western Europe, for
example – but those are standard, workable issues rather than
important changes needing to be made for Eurovision's continued
presence.
4. Give the Dutch a
Guaranteed Place in the Grand Final
This year, the Dutch won
the right to compete in the Grand Final – quite handily, finishing
a runaway second in its Semi Final – however, as a result of the
investigation into Joost Klein were unable to compete in it. They
obviously can't enter the same song again next year, and even if the
police investigation is fruitless Joost himself may not want to
return after this traumatic and entirely avoidable experience at the
incompetent hands of the EBU, but they have earned a place in the
finale that they haven't used. There's no reason the EBU couldn't
just make the Netherlands an automatic qualifier in 2025 as a way of
atoning for the (hopefully) previous management's turducken of
negligence.
That's really the bare
minimum though. Frankly, given everything the Netherlands have done
for the Eurovision Song Contest over the years – missing only four
contests in the event's history (two due to it being held on the
Dutch version of Armistice Day, two in the relegation era),
establishing the 'winner hosts the next contest' format, saving the
contest's entire existence after the 1969 tie, introducing postcards,
hosting at short notice and with no budget in 1980, creating the
special Covid broadcast in 2020 of their own volition after the
contest was cancelled, then hosting for real in 2021 when nobody
would have begrudged them for refusing, being the only country to
compete at every Junior Eurovision (and in several years being just
about the only western country there at all), hosting the biggest
preparty concert every year, and buying huuuuuuge numbers of tickets
to the contest every year – it really is time to expand the Big 5
into a Big 6 and give them a permanent grand final berth. They
already put the most money in after the Big 5. Switzerland might be
the birthplace of Eurovision, and Italy might be its parent, but the
Netherlands is Eurovision's home. They've well and truly earned it.
5. Finally Learn the
Difference Between Apolitical and Amoral
It's wonderful for
Eurovision to try and be apolitical. It would be better if it was
even possible. Politics are everywhere at Eurovision, from Bambie
Thug repeatedly quoting Harry Potter in their song while ensuring its
author (a known fan of the contest in past years and a known idol of
transphobes now) couldn't celebrate it by dressing as the trans pride
flag, to jokes about how voting for your neighbours is a sure way to
get your song disgraced but when Sweden gets twelve points from
Norway that's clearly just good taste, to Australia's ongoing and
commendable commitment to ethnically diverse acts because of the
remit of the channel it airs on. It's never going to stop, and the
EBU has to stop (1) pretending it can control it and (2) thinking
that taking no action is not, in fact, taking the side of the
oppressor for political purposes. The heavy handed nature of the
censorship this year as a result of current events is moderately
understandable in context, but there was an easy way to avoid it and,
as we've already established, the European Broadcasting Union under
Martin Österdahl has never met a
dangerously stupid decision it wasn't willing to go out of its way to
make.
There are a couple of
possible, imperfect solutions, but the one that stands out as the
most likely to be successful is just making it part of the rules for
each delegation to take full responsibility for the consequences of
anything their act and delegation does (both on stage and during the
rehearsal period), with the EBU and host broadcaster responsible for
any other issues like stage invaders and so forth. It sounds so
obvious when you see it that it's kind of difficult to work out why
it wasn't already the setup.
6. Revert to the Old
Combined Scoring System (in Both the Semis and the Grand Final)
I mentioned earlier that
the contest in its current form appears to be being produced with the
mindset of a reality show. Nowhere is that more evident than the
changes made over the last decade with regards to the voting system,
with a system that worked well for four decades being destroyed
simply because the EBU – after making a tweak a couple of years
earlier that meant a winner was announced as soon as it was
mathematically impossible for anyone to outscore them rather than
after the final vote – decided to split the jury and televote
scores into two distinct score sets, revealing jury votes with the
traditional Tour of Drunk European TV Presenters and then combining
all of Europe's televotes together and having hosts rattle them off
in a segment that at best will be either an anticlimax or a deus ex
machina and at worst is actively humiliating to those who receive low
televote scores and those who finish near the bottom of the
scoreboard and have to watch the final ten or so minutes of the show
without any chance of a surprise twelve points from a country that
seems to be trolling everyone.
In addition, the last two
contests have changed the rules for the semi finals to remove the
juries, making the choice of who qualifies for the Grand Final
dependent entirely on televotes. On paper, this sounds great, in that
it will stop acts riding to the semi final without public support,
limiting the potential of anyone experiencing the famed nul points
result. In practice, it makes no difference in the bit it was
supposed to fix (since the countries that usually end up in that
situation are automatic qualifiers that don't need the semi finals),
and makes the juries too powerful in the finale (as the televote
fractures while jurors tend to vote relatively uniformly on alleged
merit). A scoring system that actively fails to accomplish the one
thing it sets out to do is not a system that can be kept.
7. Return to a
Randomised Running Order
For the first nearly six
decades of the contest's history, the order in which countries
perform has been chosen by a random draw. In 2013, however, this
started to be chosen mostly by producers, with host countries
selecting their slot randomly and everyone else randomly selecting
whether producers had to stick them in the first or second half upon
qualifying. In 2024, this format was changed again, with only half of
the qualifier draws marked and the rest giving producers the power to
slot them anywhere. This has made the contest predictable. The logic
used to justify it is that it prevents songs that are too similar
from being next to each other and cancelling themselves out (which is
a problem with the songs, not the draw; if you can't stand out from
one other song you don't deserve to win in a field of 26). In
practice, it has allowed regular contest producer Christer Bjorkman
too much control over who wins, with about half of the positions in
the final running order complete writeoffs before the final even
begins. While it's true that before the rules changed the first time
there had been a long run where every winner had been near the end of
the running order: it's a random draw. You get anomalies sometimes.
However, of the eleven
winners since Bjorkman started assigning the running orders, six have
performed within the very narrow range between 9th and
12th, with the other five all being between 18th
and 24th. Runners-up are even worse: the two drawn to
perform in the first half were both in Slot #13, while all nine of
the others have been between Slots #20 and #25. It becomes less
visible if you also consider third-, fourth-, and fifth- placers, but
there's still a clear benefit to those limited ranges of slots. If
half the countries can tell they have no chance just from where
they've been positioned in the show, why are they bothering? And if
casual viewers can tell half the countries have no chance just from
where they've been positioned in the show, why are they bothering to
watch the first few songs at all, or to stay in the room while songs
14-17 are on? There's no benefit to anyone from Bjorkman trying to
split the perceived 'favourites' (based on WHAT, Christer?) and
putting them in the same slots all the time. There's also no benefit
to having countries like Albania send songs that suit their own
culture every year only to repeatedly get dumped into the #2
deathslot as sacrificial lambs. The power for producers to put their
finger on the scales and affect results needs to end.
(For the record, the
non-randomised slots given to Bjorkman's home country of Sweden under
his control: 13, 10, 24, 20, 9, 25, 20, 9.)
8. Ditch the 'United by
Music' Slogan
It's clearly a lie. Just
look at this year.
To be more specific,
United by Music was an absolutely perfect slogan for 2023, a contest
that had to be held outside the country that won the right to host
for safety reasons. It is not a slogan that works as a generic
branding phrase that can be kept every year instead of making a new
one for each contest. Each year, the contest's slogan – usually
some sort of vapid 'why can't we all get along?' platitude like 'Come
Together' or 'Building Bridges' is used to develop the contest's
visual identity, making it feel unique and tailored to its home
country. This year, when that option was not available to Sweden, we
got the most bland contest in decades, both visually and in terms of
everything going on.
It's true that a lot of
this year's problems were probably due to production's first choices
not wanting to be associated with Israel (for more on how the
gormless corporate scuzzballs at the EBU could have done literally
anything to fix the situation, please refer to Point #2), but... in
2021 we got a unique version of the typical 'past acts sing a medley'
interval that was perfect for what they were able to do under Covid
restrictions at a time. In 2022, we had peak Italian content with one
of the hosts singing some of the country's greatest musical hits and
another singing some of his own. In 2023, the BBC had the unenviable
task of trying to do something celebrating two countries in very
different circumstances on opposite sides of the continent, while
also showing they'd finally learned what modern Eurovision was, and
nailed it by having six past acts with very different styles return
to cover iconic songs from the host city of Liverpool, ending with
all of the interval performers, the hosts, backup dancers, a group of
locals with former winner Ruslana in Kyiv, and a packed stadium
singing the city's unofficial anthem You'll Never Walk Alone
in solidarity with Ukraine. It was always going to be tough to top
that, but when you've been saddled with a slogan that doesn't fit
what you're trying to do, a production that's utterly devoid of
character, and an EBU that was actively and repeatedly undermining
even the little positive impact that slogan could have had, having a
brief appearance from Alcazar and constant appearances throughout the
week from 1999 winner Charlotte Perrelli and sketch character Lynda
Woodruff just do not cut it. It was atrocious, and we expect far
better from any country hosting Eurovision, let alone one like Sweden
that loves Eurovision so much they did a parody song during one of
the semi finals titled We Just Love Eurovision Too Much.
If the EBU does still
insist on an overarching slogan, though, I have a suggestion:
Music Speaks.
Maybe it's time for them to start listening.
