It was obvious on Saturday that the juries of so-called industry experts were totally out of touch with the people of Europe. Had the results been decided by the viewers in the 37 countries, Finland would have won by a landslide and Norway would have been third. Instead the Finns were cheated by tiny cohorts of people with undue influence who nobody knows. Indeed the BBC and other media were priming us for weeks with the prediction that Sweden was likely to win.
It is time for the BBC to use its influence and get jury votes scrapped. When the show visits the various countries, we want to know how the people voted rather than small committees. It adds to the fun if Greece always votes for Cyprus and vice versa. Sadly the late great Sir Terry Wogan got it into his head in his latter years that something sinister and political was going on when, in fact, the patterns were nothing more harmless than emigrants voting for their home countries.
A few people of a "remainer" persuasion also seem to think that many Europeans vote "against" the UK because of Brexit. They fail to appreciate that to get any votes in Eurovision, substantial numbers of people have to think that your song is better than the other 25. People vote "for" songs they like, they do not vote against anybody. Safe acts like Mae Muller simply don't stand out as the best.
Other than that, it was a great week and Liverpool did us proud.
(I went to the first SF and was blown away by the Norwegian entry - so I backed it at 16/1 hoping it would pay for my ticket like in 1998 when I backed Dana International at 7/1 after going to the final dress rehearsal in Birmingham. No such luck. The Liverpool crowd were going mad for Finland.)
It's a difficult one. The role of the juries is to lift songs that are good songs but might be overlooked by the public for being 'safe', ie Mae Muller, and they've clearly failed to do that this year by instead sending their points to entries that were always going to do well with the public vote, ie Sweden and Israel, and ultimately changing who the winner was as a result.
On the other hand one could argue that the juries are essential to lift up the good songs that would otherwise go unappreciated by the public vote ie the 'safe' songs and the ballads, and those that are screwed in the public vote by the running order. One will note that all of the countries that performed before Sweden in 09 got less than 100 points from the public vote, including the Austrian and French entries that had both been expected to do well, and in the case of the Austrian entry was a huge hit with the crowd in the arena too.
Eurovision didn't have the Jury vote for much of the 2000s and the quality difference between Eurovision entries now and then is noticeable. We're getting fewer songs like Ukraine's 2007 entry 'Dancing Lasha Tumbai' which as fun as they are have no meaning to them and the lyrics are utter nonsense, instead we now have more songs with a proper composition to them and lyrics that actually make sense, often whilst still being fun. Even this year's Croatian entry had a message behind it!
There definitely needs to be changes to how the jury vote works at Eurovision but I don't think scrapping them is the right idea. Changing the weighting of the jury vote/public vote so that the public vote is more powerful than the jury vote could be a better option. (And convincing the Swedes not to select Loreen again
)
Those who moan about people voting "against" the UK really frustrate me. Two reasons, firstly we did badly even before the Brexit referendum, and secondly all it shows is that we weren't in that many people's top 10. A song could be the 11th most popular song that year with every other country and still get 'Nul Points', yet a song that was the favourite in one country and the least popular everywhere else would have points. Points alone don't show how popular the song really was.
