Welcome to our August edition of the ESC Insight newsletter. Here we are giving you the latest news and views from across the Eurovision circuit even in these off-season months.
Check out the Newsletter through this link and read on about the selection deadlines and calendar dates for your diary, as well as the National Finals coming this week in the world of Junior Eurovision. Our in-depth feature from Newsletter Editor Ben Robertson this week is all about Switzerland. Once again forming their three-country selection process for the new year, Ben gives the format from the Alpine nation a critical eye.
“Perhaps I am too hasty to suggest a need to change after one bad result, but Switzerland’s qualification figures with this combined format are poor. Only two in five entries made it to the Saturday night, and Anna Rossinelli was frankly the lucky jury darling that made her inoffensive na-na-na-na-na’s fodder for middling scores across the continent come Tuesday May 10th. Switzerland’s insistence to keep with their original formula strikes of a lack of ambition, and fails to address many of the problems their selection process has.
Firstly, the online format SRF use just doesn’t generate the levels of excitement it should. The voting system is faffy at best. In the one month uploading window, fans can favourite songs that put them higher up the viewing list online, but real votes don’t count until a later window. It’s like a F1 race where you can get in pole position, but it doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s daft. It’s a cynical ploy by SRF to keep supporters coming back to their website for weeks on end and generates a dull and tiresome voting window. Much more engaging would be releasing all the songs simultaneously and generating one big media output than lots of tiny bursts.”
To read the rest of Ben’s views and the rest of the ESC Insight newsletter, then make sure to click through on the link here. If you like what you read then subscribe to the newsletter so every post gets sent straight to your inbox as soon as it is ready.
I’m afraid I just don’t believe the votes cast on the Swiss online selection are genuinely counted – every year the qualifying entries are ones that barely got any mention on the fan sites, who must make up a huge percentage of the votes that get cast, and much more popular ones never get through. If you’d heard the original demo version of In Love For A While that was submitted to the website in 2011 there’s no way it would’ve got more than a couple of votes from her family, it was utterly woeful – the fact it got such a big revamp before the NF was interesting to say the least. This has had the knock on effect that people don’t want to put the effort into submitting an entry for a process with an extremely suspicious (and at the very least opaque) voting process. Hopefully SSR will prove me wrong and at least release the full results this time…