Eurovision 50 concert

One of my friends is a huge Eurovision anorak (he has MS Excel charts showing who voted for who from the last 35 years!) and this time last year he was getting very excited when word spread around the Eurovision fans network that the BBC had been chosen to host the 50 year event, and it was going to be at The Royal Albert Hall in late October.

Obviously someone somewhere changed their mind and the plans and live show decamped onto mainland Europe.

And it overran by 20 minutes, caught the end of it on RTE TWO. Marty Whelan is certainly no Terry Wogan I can tell you, however hard he tries

Some of the acts chosen performed their songs on stage, such as Brotherhood of Man, Nicole and Johnny Logan (he performed "Hold Me Now", but not "What's Another Year") - Johnny also later performed his own single.

I was also expecting at the end when the results were announced that the programme would call around various locations a la the real event, but instead you had that silly nonsense with opening envelopes.

And who was that bloke who came on stage to accept the award on ABBA's behalf? I'm surprised that Bjorn and Benny at least didn't turn up, thought I spotted them at some point but instead it was the 2000 Danish winners the Olsen Brothers...

Linda Martin certainly does not have the voice she had 13 years ago - she altered the very way the song is sung to avoid the high notes

As bizarre as the intercutting between the original VTs and the dancing was, at least the cheorography was of a decent quality - really excellent in fact. A pity though that all of the original artists couldn't have beed rounded up. And even when they did appear they all mimed remarkably badly, esp Logan.
It was good to see to see they at least panned and scanned much of the original footage for 16:9 to preserve composition.

Yes as noggin says, the broadcasters pay for rights for the show as well, so the BBC's rejection of it meant they also avoided the no doubt hefty fee. A few years ago Ireland was given the option of taking Germany's rights for the junior Eurovision at the last minute when they pulled out, but would have had to pay Germany's fee which ran into a couple of hundred thousand. No doubt the UK's fee for this show would've been similar.

It went well overall - Katrina and Renars made for great hosts, very competent. Renars in particular was as good as when hosting in 2003 - laid back and fun, but confident in what he was doing too.

Just one thing that stood out from the show was the SVT Stockholm production from 2000, showed up on the big screen during the Olsen Brothers.
It was very notable how static the production vlaues were comapered to their crane and stedicam orgies in recent years. It was quite startling to be reminded of just how conventional the 2000 show was.
Clearly they changed their directorial style (or just the director ) in the intervening 2/3 years. Of course the progress in technologies has also helped.