Oh, this year is known for many other things – the first time a country won for the third time in a row. The first country to host two successive contests. The first year with seven new participating countries. The first year with the relegation system. Yet what it will always be most remembered for is Riverdance. We’ll get to that once I’ve discussed the songs.
Oh yeah, the songs. Sigh. This is yet another year with an overabundance of ballads, and I am genuinely running out of things to say about them. I’m not shitting on ballads just for the hell of it, or to piss people off, I simply don’t click with 98% of them, and I do not understand the difference between a good one and a bad one, or one that will score well and one that will score badly. The best I can do is say ‘yeah, this person can sing’ and then I lose interest. So this is yet another year where I don’t love any of the songs, and where the winner is the ‘best of a bad (or at most mediocrely meh) bunch’.
Anyway, about the other things. So yes, Ireland won for the third time in a row, and as at today they are still the only country to have managed this, even if Sweden have equaled them in total wins. Ireland has one more win to go (their best, in my opinion), and then it’s the long slide towards eternal non-qualification for them. Maybe they’ll break their NQ streak this year – by all accounts their song is a little different this year, but we’ll see.
About non-qualifications: by this time Eurovision had got so popular that there were more countries wanting to participate than the EBU had room for. They set the maximum number of songs at 25 and as at 1993/94 introduced a system where the lowest-scoring countries were not allowed to participate the next year. As such we have no entries from Belgium, Denmark, Israel, Luxembourg, Slovenia or Turkey this year (and, of course, Luxembourg decided not to return at all in the end). Italy also did not participate, but of their own choice. Instead there were seven new countries: Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia, with varying levels of success.
(A note on Russia in Eurovision: as I said before, I do not intend to go political in this blog and I will judge each Russian entry on its own merits in relation to my taste. That said, Russia is a shithole country ruled by a megalomanic despot who cares for nothing but his own power and comfort, and who is making the life of every single Ukranian a total misery with his completely unjustified and idiotic war. If Russia were to sink into the ocean, the world would be a much better place.)
Back to the relegation system – it was an absolutely idiotic decision to bar countries from participating on the merit of their song the previous year, rather than the way they do it now, i.e. by judging them on their song for this year. Unfortunately it stayed in place for a decade before they finally introduced the semi-finals that happen to this day. (At least, I think it was a decade – I’m reasonably sure that 2004 had the first semi-final.) The stupid relegation system caused countries like Belgium and later Germany to break their perfect participation record, meaning there is now not a single country that has participated in every Eurovision since it started.
The winner was a runaway one, and there is one nul pointer this year, plus a few that got pretty close. Relegation for you, you failures.
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Theft and Sorcery 