A Euro state of mind
It’s time for Canada to get on board with the world’s biggest TV singing contest
STOCKHOLM— It’s one of the most successful live TV entertainment programs in the world, which this year will reach an estimated 200 million viewers.
Europeans have been love-hating it for six decades, Australia’s got skin in the game and for the first time this year it’s being screened live in the U.S., featuring a live performance by Justin Timberlake.
It’s time for Canada to get on board with the Eurovi- sion Song Contest.
Founded in1956, Eurovision is an annual competition to choose the best pop song in Europe and the granddaddy of all TV song contest formats. What makes it unique is that it’s a contest of nations, with broadcasters from participating countries sending along three-minute original pop songs.
For its first four decades a sedate evening-long affair, the contest has ballooned into a whole week’s entertainment scene, which this year is taking place in the Swedish capital. (Winning the contest brings with it the responsibility of hosting the following year and hunky Swede Mans Zelmerlow took home the honours in 2015 with his song “Heroes.”)
The competition began Tuesday night with a semifinal, in which 18 countries competed for 10 slots in Saturday night’s final; the exercise was repeated on Thursday.
Tonight, those 20 finalists will join six automatic qualifiers — the contest’s biggest funders, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., as well as host country Sweden — in the big sing-off.
The winner will be decided in a realtime vote, which many spectators agree is the most exciting part of the whole spectacle.
For the first time this year, votes by expert juries from each nation will be announced first; they count for 50 per cent of the total. Then televotes from all participating countries will be revealed, adding up to lots of drama, organizers hope, since the televoting could diverge from the juries’ picks.
Knowledge of the contest thus far in Canada is limited, despite the fact Céline Dion won in 1988 (artists don’t need to hail from the country for which they perform, so she won for Switzerland, singing “Ne Partez Pas Sans Moi”).
It has never been broadcast live here, though this might change soon.
“There tends to be a definitive concentration of interest in the contest within specific communities in Toronto, primarily European immigrants and the LGBTQ community,” says Slavisa Mijatovic, a Bosnia and Herzegovina-born fan who wrote his MA thesis at York University about the ways in which migrants engage with Eurovision.
Watching the contest and cheering for the home country allows migrants to keep in touch with roots and traditions, while allowing gay spectators to engage with LGBTQ communities around the world, “which are getting more and more interconnected,” Mijatovic observes.
The contest’s definition of Europe has long been much broader than the Old Continent: members of the European Broadcasting Union or the Council of Europe are allowed to participate, so Israel, Turkey and Azerbaijan are able to compete — and all of them have won and hosted.
Eurovision’s geographical promiscuity was off the charts last year with the participation of Australia; thanks to an excellent fifth-place showing the Aussies are back again in 2016 with “Sound of Silence” performed by South Korea-born singer Dami Im, and bookies are predicting another top-five finish.
This is doubtless what opened the door for the contest to be shown live in the U.S. for the first time on the Viacom-owned cable channel Logo, which specializes in LGBTQ-oriented programming.
“Reaching another continent is good for the brand and it’s good for the artists,” says Sietse Bakker, the contest’s event supervisor. “Suddenly, they’re reaching another big market. I am sure we will take time to build up an American audience but we can only start to begin to imagine where this is going in the next 10, 20, 30 years.”
So what about a Canadian broadcast? In 2014 and 2015, Netherlandsbased OUTtv programmed the contest in Canada on a multi-week delay, but it didn’t seem to click with viewers. (That the Canadian commentators talked over the songs and displayed little knowledge of the competition was likely part of the problem.)
OUTtv is taking a year out from broadcasting the contest here, but CEO Marc Putman says that it’s the channel’s “very strong ambition” to broadcast live in Canada from 2017. “We really believe in it and want to allow Canadian viewers to experience its very European craziness.”
In the meantime, the contest will be live streamed on Eurovision.tv from 3 p.m. Saturday. Acts to watch are Russia’s Sergey Lazarev performing the top-tipped “You Are the Only One” in a spectacular staging (he floats in mid-air) and France’s smiley Amir with the upbeat love song “J’ai cherché.”