In a recent article, we postulated: What emerges quickly is that entries ranked in the top 5 of either the jury or televote rankings of their semi-final qualifies for that year’s Grand Final. Well…we now have the full results from the semi-finals. Let’s see if the method held up. Semi-final One For this semi-final we […]
As another Eurovision season comes to a close, John Egan crunches some of the numbers from this year’s Grand Final. There are some surprises! For the second year in a row the bookies’ favourite has triumphed: congratulations to the Netherlands’ Duncan Laurence, whose Arcade joins the list of Eurovision champions. Duncan and his songwriting colleagues […]
In part one we examined the relative importance of performance order with respect to Grand Final qualification. The concise finding from that analysis that performance order can improve an entry’s prospects quite a lot, but there are no genuinely hopeless slots. But what about winning a semi-final? Are there any genuinely sweet slots? How important […]
In a live, competitive competition, what you do and when you do it both are important. But how important is the “when” bit, when the immediate goal is qualifying for the Grand Final? In this article John Egan looks at the question of Grand Final qualification in the two semi-final era of the Eurovision.
“Brutal.” “A bloodbath.” “So unfair.” “Toughest semi-final in history.” These were but a few of the comments made in the Lisbon bubble about the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest first semi-final. The overwhelming consensus was that Tuesday’s line-up of entries was much stronger, there were more than 10 entries deserving of a place in this year’s […]
Does said membership disproportionately benefit a 12 member Russophone bloc’s preferred entry? Click through for a lengthy analysis!
the 2018 Grand Final result was clear and unremarkable. John Egan takes a look at some of the numbers.
Portugal’s 2017 victory was a landmark: a first victory after 50 attempts, a non-English language victory for only the second time in the televote era, and the first aligned victory (in terms of jury and public rankings) since 2014. All of which makes for a comprehensive victory…unless all is not necessarily as it seems, if you dig a bit deeper. So dig we have. Or at least tried
Before this year’s Contest, most fans would probably agree that hip hop is the one genre that has not done nearly as well at the Eurovision when compared to its global popularity. Although 2003 champion Sertab Erener rapped her way through the bridge of Every Way That I Can. the song, however, was more a […]
Aside from its own argot—because expressions like pre-selection, do a Rossinelli, PED, Eurovision-by-numbers, styling och consulting, make no sense outside ESC fanland—few topics are as vexing as the issue of language at the Eurovision. Whilst for the most part the Contest using English as its business language is accepted (with French increasingly only used for […]
