In this week’s ESC Insight Newsletter we review all the news from the Heads of Delegation meeting, listen to the penultimate song to be announced and review the best bits of news from around the internet. Our regular column, Robertson’s Reflection, has been replaced this week by Sillerud’s Snippet. ESC Insight’s Derek Sillerud this week applies the theory of nudging to understand how Hovi Star became the obvious choice for Israel.
But one National Final stood out for me more than many others: Israel, and it has more to do with what they were singing than probably any other factor. Israel uses the format where each singer chooses a song from a list provided, and the most popular performer would take that song to Sweden. With only four contestants, the odds were short that two of them would choose the same song and perform it with different arrangements, which is exactly what turned out to happen.
We’ve seen this occur before in Germany in both 2010, where Lena Meyer-Landrut and Jennifer Braun both sang ‘Satellite’, and in 2012 where Roman Lob and Ornella de Santis sang ‘Standing Still’, and again with Jacques Houdek and Daria Kinzer in 2011 in Croatia with ‘Lahor’. While this might have made the competition seem repetitive for the home viewer, it was actually giving one of these singers a slight edge.
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