Why Latvia And Israel Are Perfectly Drawn In Second Written by Ben Robertson on March 30, 2022 | 1 Comment

The reveal of the running order for the Eurovision Semi Finals this year was via the medium of a YouTube premiere. This allowed the community to gather around their screens at the same time to witness the flow from one song to the next trying to anticipate which delegation’s country was coming next. It made the reveal a far more enjoyable shared experience; more of this please!

But we’re here for the running order of the two Semi Finals. On the whole these were predictable. No one batted an eyelid when Albania was revealed as the show opener to the first Semi Final. ‘Sekret’ is built for a bombastic stage show that will bring the Pala Alpitour to life and guarantee that every single person in the crowd is loud and ready to party. It screams what the Eurovision Song Contest is all about.

Similarly pleasing to the community is the placement of the track opening the second Semi Final. By opening with The Rasmus the Song Contest arguably brings the biggest name in the show out to meet the audience first. Because of this big name appeal many viewers will want to tune in to see what they will be bringing. Furthermore, The Rasmus brings an orchestrated number with a rich production that will fill the arena – much like what Albania will do two days earlier albeit worlds apart in terms of genre.

However what at first glance feels odd is what follows on from these crowd-pleasing openers. ‘Eat Your Salad’ and ‘I M’ strike me as the complete antithesis to what we have learnt about position number two in the running order.

The Curse of Drawing Second

It is commonplace within the Eurovision Song Contest community to refer to the running order position of second is known as the ‘slot of death’. We have never seen a winner of the Eurovision Song Contest from either the Grand Final or the smaller Semi Finals come from position number two. On the other hand we can point out National Final winners here and there, or the first ever Junior Eurovision winner, to signify that number two isn’t as cursed as many believe in this competitive sphere of music. Nevertheless as Ewan Spence said on our podcast reviewing the running order announcement, the “myth is real” of drawing number two regardless of any data.

While naysayers will point towards an acceptable qualification rate of 42 % since Eurovision has featured two semi finals, that number drops to 25 % since 2013 when producers placed which song suffered the fate of being placed 2nd. Indeed, we have to go back to 2017 to find a song drawn 2nd that qualified for a Eurovision Grand Final.

This is in keeping with what trends are seen in other entertainment programming. A 2019 academic paper studying Strictly Come Dancing and its American spin off found that both the public and jurors tended to reward performances later in the show with more points. While a later draw as a general rule is better in terms of acts receiving good votes from the public, the position of first holds up better than other early slots. The authors, Collins, McKenzie and Vaughan Williams, suggest this may be because producers are “purposefully scheduling a ‘strong’ couple first in the show to give the episode a strong and positive start” to keep the audience at home engaged.

Data from the Eurovision Song Contest would agree with that. Looking through the 16 Eurovision Semi Finals since the producers selected the running orders, 9 openers have qualified through to the Grand Final. Show openers are more than double as likely to qualify than those drawn 2nd. To me this suggests that when producers muddy their hands by producing the running order of their choosing, they amplify the peaks and troughs that running first or second in the show can give.

You would think therefore as a contest producer you would be incredibly careful and cautious about placing an artist second in the running order. These myths of the power of running order are so well known and are to the emotional storytelling from the artist’s perspective. Take a gander at the joyous Twitter feed from We Are Domi immediately after the running order revealed they will end Semi Final Two and tell me these things don’t matter.

So imagine deciding that you are going to place somebody second in the running order not once, but twice.

Let me introduce you to a 16 year old boy from Sweden…

Theoz’s Natural Immunity

I’m taking you all back to this year’s edition of Melodifestivalen, Sweden’s selection for the Eurovision Song Contest that once again saw millions of viewers and a packed out Friends Arena on final night.

In that final was 16-year-old Theoz. Depending on how you measure stardom one could argue that Theoz was the biggest name in the entire Melodifestivalen line up. That is because Theoz has over 2 million TikTok subscribers – most of whom discovered his dance moves on the app before he stepped up to become the next Swedish pop star.

And Theoz sung from second in both shows.

The song that Theoz brought to Melodifestivalen, ‘Som Du Vill’, is no slouch. Reaching the Spotify top ten here in Sweden after the first heat, two months later the song still bounces inside the domestic top twenty. Genre wise the best way of describing this is as cookie-cutter Melfest – and I mean that as absolutely zero criticism. ‘Som Du Vill’ is a fine example of how to bring well-produced Swedish language pop to the arena stage with a melody and structure that might be simple and predictable but is smashingly effective.

In that sense it is exactly what the casual viewer anticipates Melfest music to be.

This combination of a well known act with an accessible piece of pop music strikes me as the classic combination in selecting a show opener – not one drawn second. That’’s even more off-kilter when one considers who was drawn to open these shows, with Malou Prtyz’s ‘Bananas’ and Klara Hammarström’s ‘Run To The Hills’ both uptempo and both acts appealing to the same younger demographic that Theoz would be. We have come to expect Melodifestivalen to pride itself on providing a diverse running order each week and mixing up where different types of songs lie in the show. Instead, not once but twice, we opened the show with two tracks aimed squarely at Melodifestivalen’s younger audience.

My rationale for Theoz being drawn second is that of all the artists affected by the myth of being drawn second, he was the one most immune to its effects, myth or otherwise.

Malou Prtyz and Klara Hammarström were both entering Melodifestivalen for the third time. Much of the anticipation of their entries was coupled onto how well they would do competitively. Malou was looking to make it out of her heat for the third straight time and Klara aimed to place higher than the 6th place she was the year prior. Placing either of these artist’s second would have crippled the entire speculation storyline – the will they/won’t they qualify narrative – that was associated with these acts and their return to Melodifestivalen.

Theoz’s appearance in Melfest by contrast felt more to create a local hit than it was tied to whether he finished high on the scoreboard or not.

One also can consider how Theoz’s fan base is different from Malou’s and Klara’s. They may be aiming for the votes of Melfest’s younger audience, but Theoz’s biggest fans are the youngest of them all. We see evidence for this in the Melodifestivalen results in the final where Theoz won the 3-9 year old category, but following this his highest rank was a 6th place finish with 10-15 year olds. If I may make a hypothesis about these youngest of the youngest voters I predict that none of them at this early age have accumulated the knowledge that 2nd is the worst running order slot.

Finally, and somewhat anecdotally, I suggest that the heavy placing of such kids fan favourites in Melodifestivalen early in the running order is in itself intentional. In northern Europe families wake up earlier and go to bed earlier on average than those in the Mediterranean. Some tiny Melfest fans may struggle to make it the whole way through the show before their favourites appear on stage. Is the idea to put their favourite acts on early so they get to see them before going to bed?

Some voting data does suggest this type of early show effect – for example in this year’s 2nd heat Tone Sekelius finished dead last of all remaining songs with the 3-9 age category in the heat after being drawn as the last act of the night. In the final however Tone ended up ranked fifth from the same age category, climbing over the two other acts that qualified to the final from the same heat.

All of this suggests that the early draw and the use of second in the running order is for those acts where the competition isn’t defined by where you finish on the scoreboard. Theoz’s participation in Melfest was about making a local hit and succeeding in entertaining preschool children up and down the country. His eventual seventh place was the icing on the cake.

He was the perfect candidate for performing second.

Eurovision’s Perfect Second Placers

Let us again swing back to the Eurovision Song Contest, and to the fact that Latvia and Israel have been chosen to perform in slot number two this year.

At first glance this is equally as unusual as the placing of Theoz was in Melodifestivalen. Both of these songs are uptempo crowd pleasers full of energy, coming after show openers that kick things off with a bang.

We have grown up in this era with producers using a sawtooth approach to running order creation. We are used to tempo and visual production to shift as wildly as possible from one song to the next. We are used to energetic openers and therefore melancholic songs in number two to shift the mood and focus. We expect songs drawn second to have the same contrast as ‘Amen‘ did to ‘Discoteque‘ or ‘The Lucky One‘ had to ‘Adrenalina‘ last year. Latvia and Israel this year bring music that is anything but melancholic.

Latvia are being represented by the group Citi Zēni, who describe themselves as the ‘Princes of Rap’ and ‘Divas of 21st Century Pop’ as per their eurovision.tv description. Their song ‘Eat Your Salad’ is typical for the group with its eccentric style, energetic performance and lyrics that shock the first time listener.

How can Citi Zēni win with their Eurovision appearance? Similarly to Theoz, winning for them doesn’t necessarily mean winning on the scoreboard on Grand Final night. Winning for them is going to mean going viral, getting attention and making new fans internationally for their upcoming second album. We all know what line of this song is going to go viral while the Semi Final is broadcast – and the producers will want Eurovision to be making headlines on social media as early in the show as they possibly can.

If I pivot to the second Semi Final and to Michael Ben David’s ‘I M’ one may also wonder why the show needs this bold, brash and fabulously over-the-top performance directly after The Rasmus have set the stage on fire.

But those qualities are exactly why a draw position of number two is so perfect. There is no doubt in my mind that Michael Ben David is going to bring a performance that will be one of the shows most memorable come the recap. It also fits into a certain niche of camp pop that knows exactly what demographic it is aiming to appeal to. Running order isn’t needed for songs like this to have impact – for those who are looking for them they will pop no matter when they are shown during the two hour spectacle.

Similarly to how Theoz’s success in Melodifestivalen was immune to his second slot, so too can I not think of better acts in the first half of each show that would have that same immunity.

The Storytelling of Songs

The biggest trend I felt from the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest production was the use of the running order as a narrative. The piece of prose that connects the dots from one track to the next isn’t just to make the right sonic balance, but also to make the flow easier for the commentators. I still giggle to myself when I note how Efendi and Tix ran back-to-back last year or how Blind Channel and Jendrik’s alternative middle finger statements ran side-by-side. I’m looking forward to every commentator taking the open goal of commenting how Greek artist Amanda Tennfjord, who grew up in Norway, performs before, ahem, Norway.

The storytelling of Eurovision will likely never escape the fact, whether it is a myth or not, that number two is its worst competitive placing to have. The trend used to be to place songs here of a tempo pointing downwards from an energetic opening. The new trend appears to be to place songs second in the running order that stand out on their own merit, to their own audience, and which apologise for nothing in their outlandish delivery.

Assuming Latvia and Israel serve those unforgettable performances in May then I would consider this mission accomplished.