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Ask Team Insight
In which our writers are given the opportunity to sound off on a topic close to our hearts. This week’s question is “If you could make one change to the official Eurovision rulebook, what would it be?”
Ben Robertson
Drop the jury voting for all songs from first place to last place, and have them only pick a top 10 or 15. Eurovision is a place for positive voting, not negative as jury members now have the power to do.
Ewan Spence
Running order for shows to be decided by a random draw. I know the arguments on increasing excitement and giving each song a chance to stand out, but I’ve always favoured Eurovision to lean towards being a fair Contest, rather than a manufactured spectacle. The running order impacts on the result, therefore it should be random.
John Egan
Let all the prequalified finalists perform live during their voting semi-final as the voting/interval act. 3 x 4 minutes so these acts get as many live opportunities as the semi-finalists.
Lisa-Jayne Lewis
Change the start time to 7pm (U.K.) 8pm Central Europe. It’s on too late (not really a rule, but it doesn’t make any sense to remain in its time slot.)
Sharleen Wright
A controversial one… but… looking to JESC as a trial, I think we should change it so that winner simply has first refusal to host. Lets go into the contest with less pressure felt by smaller countries, nor any fear from some others to host (Sharleen made this recommendation prior to the recent developments in Kyiv – John Lucas).
Check out the rest of this week’s Eurovision analysis by reading the latest newsletter in full right here.
I thought the winning country always has first right of refusal if they can’t host the show?
Modern ESC needs a lot more preperation then it did 15-20 years ago. Also many venues are already booked a year in advance. So besides the right to refusal, I think the winner should get the right to host the contest two years after instead of the one in the next year. So winner of 2017 will host in 2019, winner of 2018 in 2020 etc.