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The stage is nearly ready, and the first stand-in rehearsals start next week. The online preview parties are under way and there’s a musical flood of alternate version. It’s been a busy week for the Eurovision Song Contest.
Eurovision Insight Podcast: Four Hours To Finish The Contest
Our first name for Junior Eurovision 2021, our first smartphone game of the year, and the first ‘live-to-tape’ broadcast is confirmed. Ewan Spence and the ESC Insight team bring you the news from the world of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Stay up to date with the Eurovision Song Contest news as we approach May and Rotterdam 2021 by listening to the ESC Insight podcast. You’ll find the show in iTunes, Google Podcasts, and Spotify. A direct RSS feed is available. We also have our email newsletter which you can sign up to here.
The organising broadcasters NOS (task-based, important state events, like the BBC), AVROTROS (member-based) and NPO (umbrella organisation of the aforementioned) are totally right in taking into account the viewers at home more, especially during COVID-19. What Israeli broadcaster KAN did in 2019 is obviously wonderful for the audience present. And it sure gave the 2019 contest a more ‘concert’-vibe. However, for me as a viewer at home, and also for older viewers (we barely talk about them), the 4 hour and 15 min runtime for the contest was simply too daunting and long to stay focused. The attention span for the viewers at home gets lost this way. Sadly, most of it is attributed to opening acts and interval acts that become too long and too unstructured. Great for the fans, but what about all those 250 million viewers at home? To me this was the biggest pitfall of the 2019 contest.
Sietse Bakker is totally right to trim the show to max. 3 hours and 45 min’s.