In this week’s ESC Insight Newsletter we focus on the news from Albania, the start of Belgium’s three week long competition, and the tease from YLE over UMK. There was also news from Spain, Finland and Armenia leaking out over the festive period.
Our regular newsletter column ‘Robertson’s Reflection’ takes a longer-than-normal look over the fallout of split results and full transparency revealed from the Junior Eurovision competition last year for some statistical goodies.
One obvious example is that from Australia’s debut. Before the Contest I was concerned that the predominantly Eastern European countries taking part in Junior would not warm to Australia as much as their fifth place in Vienna suggested. The final result of Bella Paige’s 8th is perfectly fine for the land Down Under, but the televoting did crash and burn ‘My Girls’ into a 13th place even I as a non-fan of the song would say was undeserved. There were 10 televoting points from Malta, and 6 from Bella’s diaspora home country of Macedonia, but also zeroes from Ukraine, Russia and bizarrely even Ireland and Italy with the home viewers.
The Australian gimmick doesn’t automatically mean televoters will flock each time to vote and they need to be cautious in predicting success every year. Now needing to qualify from the Semi Final, Junior Eurovision shows that it’s not going to be a run-in-the-park for the Aussies.
Remember to read the Newsletter in full through this link to get more of the in-depth analysis on the Eurovision bubble.