The announcers at the competition spoke mostly in English (with important information repeated in French), so it is common for each country to have a commentator back home doing voice-over translations into the native tongue. So, it may seem odd that there would be an English commentator, since there is very little need for translation. Instead, the BBC commentator used the opportunity to provide acerbic, sarcastic, and witty comments, which added a whole new dimension to the experience. For instance, an Azerbaijani singer performed during the vote-counting. The commentator explained that since this was being broadcast across Europe, this was an attempt to give the singer some European-wide exposure. He added parenthetically that the singer is married to the daughter of the autocratic “President” of Azerbaijan and then deadpanned, “what are the odds?”
The program started at 7pm, which worked very well for us, but perhaps not so well in Azerbaijan where it was midnight! There were 26 competitors (ten each from the two semifinals and the automatic qualifiers of host Azerbaijan and the "Big Five" countries who put up most of the money for the competition: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) and each song lasted three minutes. The stage crew managed to change out the equipment between acts remarkably quickly, but the competition still lasted over three hours. Consequently, most of Eastern Europe was voting after midnight and that the central Asian viewers had to wait until the wee hours of the morning to hear who the winner was.
After all of the competitors had performed, viewers were given fifteen minutes to call their votes into the broadcasting stations of their own countries. This popular vote was then combined with the selections made by that country's panel of experts. Finally, each country reported their results in turn on live TV. The act with the most votes from a country was given 12 points. The next act got ten points, then 8, 7, 6, and so on down to one point. So, San Marino’s 32,000 citizens had as much of a vote as Russia’s 142 million comrades. Yep, the system is as messed up as the U.S. Senate and our wonderful Electoral College. Thankfully, it only deals with the winner of a song contest, not with the fundamental structure of the most powerful government on Earth……….
There certainly was a wide range of types of songs and acts to choose from. The first contestant was the United Kingdom's Engelbert Humperdinck, or “the Hump,” as the BBC commentator referred to him. Since the competition is usually between up-an-coming artists, the decision to put up an established and successful singer (yes, that Engelbert Humperdinck) as a contestant was considered to be somewhat odd. Nonetheless, he didn’t do too well, coming in second-to-last. You could blame it on his age (76) and his lack of an energetic accompanying dancing act. However, Russia’s six singing grandmothers, the oldest of whom was also 76, came in second with a song in Russian and English and with very little dancing. It turns out that there are strong voting blocs, which might explain this. The Scandinavian countries tend to vote for one another, as do the old Soviet and Eastern bloc countries and the Balkan states.
There was a Cold Play knock-off out of Germany that Spencer said was his favorite. The girls like the Danish band, whose lead singer sounded very much like Taylor Swift. Sally and Sígrun Lilja gushed over the voice of the Estonian singer and we all agreed that he looked quite handsome as well. There were a number of energetic dance songs, but Shan found the Ukrainian entry most catchy. Of course, the favorite for all of us was Iceland. In the end, though, Sweden ran away with the contest, beating Russia by a large margin. The song was enjoyable, but it was not anything particularly fantastic from our point of view Iceland came in 20th, which was a shame, given that Turkey’s entry, which would have fit into a musical very well, was in the top ten.
No comments:
Post a Comment