Eurovision 2011 - 10/12/14 May 2011

Nemesis Nick?

Are you sure? The last couple of years, it has bugged me what would happen if the winner (and hence host country for the following year) was one of the Big 4 - i.e. UK, France, Germany, Spain.

If Turkey, as 2010 runners-up, do consequently get automatic qualification to the 2011 ESC final, I hope they come up with a decent song (not the nauseating garbage they had this year), with no strobe lighting (that's a totally pointless unnecessary gimmick).

There's no real requirement for ESC to come from a capital city - though often they do.

The last time I think that a non-capital was the host city was Istanbul in 2004 (Ankara is the capital of Turkey), and before that in 1999 the event was hosted in Jerusalem rather than Tel-Aviv (though I'm not going to go into those politics!), and in 1998 it was in Birmingham not London...

There is obviously the issue in smaller countries of venue choice - often the only venue large enough is in the capital (and in a few cases the capital is NOT the largest city or the obvious choice)

When the contest was smaller it was routine for the event NOT to come from the capital. The UK hosted in London a couple of times (RAH, Wembley Arena, Television Centre?) but also hosted in Birmingham, Brighton, Harrogate and Edinburgh.

Norway have hosted in Bergen as well as Oslo, and Sweden hosted in Gothenburg as well as Stockholm. Ireland didn't always host in Dublin - Millstreet was the venue one year in the 90s.

Just to throw a venue out... The Veltins-Arena would be a spectacular venue.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veltins-Arena

I heard some mutterings last night that it would be Hamburg.

It'd be crap in the semi-finals as they can never sell out the tickets even in the smaller stadiums. Also Denmark in 2001 showed that it doesn't work fantastically well in a stadium of that size. Indeed a lot of the audience couldn't see the stage at all! It'd probably be fine for a regular concert but this is first and foremost a TV show.

Yep - you need a venue that has the space and facilities required to host the contest, in a town/city that has the accommodation required. (If you look at the production blog you'll see how much space you need just for the megawatts of generators required for lighting, airconditioning, OB power, backup etc.)

You also need to balance the scale of arena required to make the show look "huge" - with the ability to fill the space for both the semi-finals AND the final. NRK had at least 8,000 unsold tickets after the first semi (not sure if that was for both semis, the semis and dress rehearsals or just the first semi) I hear.

Football stadia aren't always a good idea as they're a bit "flat in the middle, raked on all 4 sides", other locations may be a better fit.

I guess next year then just the "big four" will qualify automatically considering Germany won.

A few tweaks I'd like to see:
- The top five qualify automatically, plus the big four. If any of the big four are in the top 5 the 6th act etc. would qualify automatically.
- Eight acts would therefore qualify from each semi-final instead of ten, giving 25 for the final.
- The jury vote stays, but the winner of each country's phone vote automatically gets 12 points, with the jury only influencing 1-10.
- Only countries competing get a vote of their own. Viewers in eliminated/non-competing countries are pooled into a 26th European vote. The same applies to the semi-finals, with all countries voting in both - either individually or in the pooled vote. The host country would vote individually in both semi-finals, the other eight auto-qualifiers could either be in the pooled vote or split so they vote in one semi-final. individually and once in the pooled Euro vote.

I can't see it in the official rules but according to (two seperate pages of) Wikipedia, Turkey will get the other automatic qualifying spot as they came second

Insp. do you have a link to the current rules?

Well Wikipedia has been edited since I write that (and I know it's not 100% reliable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest#Number_of_songs says yes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest_2011#Historical_importance says maybe!


Is strobe lighting something that you personally are adverse to?
Turkey's song was good I thought, although maybe they were trying to do a Lordi

http://www.eurovision.tv/upload/esc2010rules.pdf is what I could find earlier. They are the rules for this year's contest so will change a bit for next year I'd have thought. As I say I can't see any reference to what happens