How to rank a Eurovision Song Contest

Back in 2020 when I first did this project I simply set out to listen to all the contests and see what it was all like before I got interested. I wanted the full experience of watching the whole show, including the several hours of voting sequences. This time around it’s more about the songs, and I set myself the challenge of ranking each song as if I were a jury member and had to vote each year. Okay, the juries never have to rank all the songs, of course, but where’s the fun if you don’t set yourself a real challenge?

Which brings me to the practicalities of doing this. I’d initially forgotten to do the rankings, so I think I was already around 1962 when I had to go back and figure out which song to put where. It was a lot of listening to snippets of the songs and deciding whether this one was better or more boring than that one, but I got to the point where I was ranking as I went along. The way I did this was on paper – I had a sheet with all the countries listed and would put a one or two word summary of the song as a reminder (the actual commentary goes into a Word doc on my PC), and along the top of the paper I’d scribble the running number of the country in its approximate place of my estimation (with left being good and right being bad). The problem with this is that every single year I’d run out of space in the middle, due to all the middling dull songs. Here is an impression of what each year would look like:

This is not an actual result – all my previous pieces of paper have long been recycled, but they all more or less looked like this. As you can see, it’s hard to read and I was getting increasingly dissatisfied with it.

I figured what I needed was a way of being able to rearrange the numbers as I went along, so my initial low-tech solution was to simply scribble all the numbers on a small piece of paper and use those to indicate the relative position of each country, simply shoving the middle ones wider and wider as more middling songs were vying for being in the middle. This looked something like this:

As you can see, a better solution, but the pieces had an annoying tendency to stick together, and I quickly got fed up with spending half a song trying to separate number seven from number eight. Also, one ill-timed, badly-aimed sigh of ballad annoyance and all the pieces would scatter everywhere! What to do, what to do?

And then I remembered that I have a geeky husband with a 3D printer, so I set him the task of printing me some nice, square, stackable numbered chips that I could use instead of the pieces of paper. He has several different colours of filament, so I also instructed him to print them in batches of five, with each next five being a different colour. I went for four colours altogether, repeated twice, so I now have 40 beautiful Eurovision ranking chips:

This made yesterday’s ranking so much easier! Look at this result!

The different colours make it even easier to tell the numbers apart, and the black really makes it all pop! And to top it all off, once I’m done they stack away real nice and tidy:

Once I get to the semi-finals I’ll have to come up with a way to work around that, but what I will most likely do is designate the countries in the final as 1 to 26 and then start the first non-qualifying entry of semi-final 1 as number 27, etc. This has now also made it easier to decide what to do about the semi-finals: I will simply continue to do one big post for each year, but just deal with the semis first and then move straight on to the final. It does mean that I’ll probably move to a post once every two weeks, because I can’t watch both semis and the final in one evening. Or maybe I’ll post up the semis and then edit the post once I’ve watched the final. No wait, I can’t do that, because I have to rank the whole year first.

Anyway, we have a happy household today, because I’ve got pretty ranking chips and my husband got to use his printer.

(I also used the Easter weekend as an opportunity to tidy up all my Eurovision posts so far and put them in a proper page, complete with menu link at the top of the page. Much neater this way!)