Wouldn't it be better then to have an Eastern Europe and a Western Europe final, rather than a random split.
It's exactly the reason though non-competing countries shouldn't be able to vote in the final. Voting in the semi-finals isn't going to make a difference if block voting continues in the final.
Each of the Big Four has to show one of the two semis. We can only vote in the one we have to show. That means that apart from Serbia (I think) each country only votes in one of the two semis. This doesn't give one country more power than any other. If you let the Big Four vote in both semis, you'd have to let every country vote in both to be fair.
What you can't have is some countries showing both and thus voting in both, and others only showing one and thus voting in just one, it would distort things horribly.
Wouldn't it be better then to have an Eastern Europe and a Western Europe final, rather than a random split.
That would go against the entire raison d'etre of Eurovision... It is there to UNITE Europe - not split it down the middle...
It would also get VERY political - how do you decide East from West? You couldn't be as crass as saying - former Warsaw-pact vs former NATO, or former Communist vs former non-Communist - you'd create an international incident...
Timezones have been suggested as a way of splitting semis - as it would allow a semi to be shown at a better time in the more Eastern European regions who are further ahead than us in time terms.
Having said that - in the early 90s there was a "behind closed doors" pre-judging event that narrowed down the entries from certain countries, deciding who would and wouldn't compete in the final. It was when they were wrestling with having too many countries wanting to enter than could be handled in one show. They did the "behind closed doors" thing, they did the "relegated for a year if you didn't do well" for a while thing and they also did a "relegated for a year if you hadn't done well for a couple of years" thing...
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It's exactly the reason though non-competing countries shouldn't be able to vote in the final. Voting in the semi-finals isn't going to make a difference if block voting continues in the final.
Block voting doesn't chose the winner though - you have to get decent votes from all countries to win - not just your neighbours and friends.
What block voting HAS done recently is distort the make-up of the final, reducing the choice of songs from certain areas in the final, and in recent years many of the final 10 songs have been from the semi, meaning they go straight through to the final the following year.
What the split semi hopefully will do is allow a greater proportion of the non-Big Four Western countries to get through to the final. (Countries like Belgium, Iceland, Norway, Denmark etc.)
Suspect you're right - but I'd love to see the looks on Androla's faces if they didn't. (For those that don't know Johnson & Häggvist are also known as Androla)
It has to be either BWO or Charlotte Perrelli to win though.
The songs I wanted to win for Duel 1 and 2 haven't won. Hoping Andreas and Carola win Duel 3 but One Love isn't a bad song but Carola and Andreas their voices are so different, they're not in harmony.
I have to say a massive amount of money must to go into Melodifestivalen. The production work is brilliant, the streaming is very high quality and the little links between everything look very high budget (i.e. the 007 bit) and its not even the final!
Aftonbladet the Swedish version to the Sun came up with the headline translating as "The Super Suprise". Go to www.aftonbladet.se to see the priceless look on Carola's face.
