Eurovision pan-Europe EU Debate

Haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere but there's an EBU organised debate between the potential leaders of the European Parliament coming up this week in what they're billing as "TV history", presumably because it's tricky to have an argument with people who can't speak the same language on such a huge scale.

It's hosted by an Italian newsreader (presumably in English) with a secondary presenter from a yoof news show on RTE and is being shown in 26 countries including the UK on BBC Parliament. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out on TV and whether or not it all gets lost in translation.

This really will be the ultimate example of mass debate. You're very welcome.

http://www.eurovisiondebate.tv/

The rules say that the "language of the debate is English" - so, presumably, both the questions and answers from the candidates will all be in English.

It'll be a political Going for Gold with a young Henry Kelly. Excellent.

Already had a debate with the candidates last week live on Euronews!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhafgcPeXes#t=105

Although an RTÉ presenter is co-presenting, RTÉ is only showing the debate on News Now.

Given that the European elections is really 28 separate national elections (as in, people vote on national issues not European ones) the merits of the exercise are unclear.

So far, the production values are not as good as The Eurovision Song Contest. Also, one of the contestants has died.

EDIT: Ten minutes in and they have gone in to 'Social Media' mode. Asking people to tweet pictures of cats or something equally as stupid. I stopped listening to be honest.

My stream on eurovisiondebate.tv seems to be stretched to 21:9

It's being shown on BBC Democracy Live too.

I turned off. What a load of crap. Feedback ahoy

The audio quality is really bad. I'll watch Question Time tonight instead and replace various words in my head with "Europe".

They used those madonna style headset mics, but there was a lot of popping on them. I didn't watch a huge amount of it to be honest. It was interesting that the main language was listed as English but where presidential candidates spoke in their native languages, they were dubbed (presumably live). Must have been a very complex operation to provide simultaneous translations - I assume the European Parliament, having legions of translators already in situ, were used to provide this for the EBU?

How did the social media engagement thing go? I lost interest at the point after the opening statements where they introduced viewers to the team looking at Twitter and Facebook from across Europe. I didn't see a huge amount of twitter activity at that point, so it'd be interesting to hear whether it kicked off later on...

The BBC Parliament feed started without any introduction, title sequence or Ident, but did end with this interesting variation of the Eurovision Ident, which reminds me a lot of the BBC World and News 24 flags idents of the late 90s: