Why Eurovision Was So Successful

The Problems with Eurovision

The idea behind Eurovision is to allow the ever increasing number of “European” countries to come together through music. To put aside their differences, their political views and even wars. The problem of course is like any other good and popular thing, politicians can’t get their hands off.

Over recent years, political voting has been rampant, eastern block countries giving maximum points to other eastern block countries. England giving large scores to France, France returning nothing. This of curse had nothing to do with the music, the thing Eurovision is all about.

How Eurovision Corrected the Scoring System

In the last few years, Eurovision voting has changed significantly. The participant countries (and that is a long story) award their points as usual. The political voting remains albeit less obvious in some cases.

However, these juries now only award half of the points. What happens now is that the great European public vote via telephone. When these scores are added to the political vote the results change dramatically.

This makes Eurovision voting very.. seriously… very exciting.

This year however there was one entry that was significantly more popular than the others, this was always going to be the winner and this is Eurovision’s real success.

The Real Eurovision Success Story

All but one country presented their songs as highly polished stage performances.

All but one country had truly impressive graphics.

Some countries but one, struggling to make themselves different, more memorable upped the stakes and employed terrible gimmicks such as a horse on a step ladder or dancing gorillas.

One country did none of this. Their entry was a single voice, a song sung from the heart, no graphics, no gimmicks just a very good song.

This song scored very highly on both Jury and Public voting even though it was sung in a language that most people don’t speak. A testament to the quality of the song and its performer.

This then is the real success of Eurovision 2017. A simple song, well crafted and sung by a single voice. Simple and effective.

This blogger hopes that in the coming years Eurovision entries will reconsider their performances. Perhaps this result has reminded us all that this competition is about the song and not necessarily about the stage production.

Well done Portugal a very worthy winner of Eurovision 2017.

Watch the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymFVfzu-2mw