Another year, another dire Irish production. It is actually identical in every way to last year's show aside from the artists, guests and (I think) the tiny stage. Same crap mentor idea that they don't bother making the most of, exactly the same boring chat about Eurovision, identical appalling graphics.
Not to mention a pile of god-awful songs.
It was appallingly produced and dull as dishwater. What was most irritating about this was that someone had clearly had some ideas about giving the selection process some sort of sense of occasion. There was a green room of sorts, spokespersons for regional juries and yes, the mentor thing, which could have worked if we'd been given some background info on the song, the writer and how they'd found the singer, perhaps in the form of a
VT. Some reason to actually care about who this person was, or at least keep things visually interesting, rather than just plonking them on the edge of the audience and having Ryan Tubridy stand over them with a mic.
The green room was on screen for about 1 minute in total I'd say. Maybe those presenters who were employed to stand in front of a green screen pretending to be in different cities might have been better utilised in actually chatting to the acts. Their presentation of the jury results, despite being delivered seemingly at lightning-speed, lacked any pace or excitement. The little elements where someone had at least made a half-arsed attempt to make things exciting, like Jedward's lap of honour from the green room to the studio, jarred with and were undermined by the lacklustre feel to the whole evening.
The production of the actual performances themselves was so dreadful that the talking heads actually said so on several occasions, to a response from Tubridy along the lines of "that's easily fixed for the real thing". Really, it shouldn't have to be. And speaking of those talking heads, their presence was entirely superfluous and the fact that they were merely filling time between acts was far too obvious. Not to mention the same, year-after-year cliches about "the glory years", the obligatory VT of the seven previous winners (last one 16 years ago) and the platitudes of "wouldn't it be great to recapture that spirit", when the level of effort put into this thing demonstrates that RTÉ clearly has no interest in recapturing anything.
I still don't understand why this has been rolled into the Late Late Show. Despite claims to the contrary, a lot of people in Ireland actually still care about the Eurovision. The national song contest is pretty much guaranteed good ratings and giving it its own dedicated studio production, broadcast on a Thursday or Saturday night would I'd imagine be a relatively cheap hour-and-a-half of television, given the relative size of the audience. Times are tough in Ireland, and I'm sure that's having a knock-on effect on RTÉ, but there are ways around it. Product Placement is allowed now, a heavily sponsor-branded show with some half-decent production would be a huge improvement on what we've got.
Maybe it's a sense that there's not too much point in bothering to put much effort into what is essentially a Jedward-rubberstamping event. But I suspect that even without the Jedward-factor, RTÉ just wouldn't have bothered anyway.