Saturday, June 18, 2011

Spread your wings and fly, fly, fly high

A final, final Eurovision post of the season (probably).  I've been having a look at the split between the jury and public votes, and a few interesting things leap out -

1) The reintroduction of the juries is having precisely the effect it was supposed to in relation to Russia.  In the televote the Russian entry finished a ludicrous eighth as a result of neighbourly voting, but the juries placed the song last, resulting in a somewhat more realistic placing of sixteenth overall.

2) The juries had the opposite effect they were supposed to have on the UK, which on televoting alone would have been in fifth place, rather than eleventh.  It's not clear why the juries hated the song so much, although their votes were based on the dress rehearsal, in which it was suggested Blue had severely underperformed.

3) On the other hand, it appears that Amaury Vassili's poor performance on the night can't fully explain why France failed to live up to their status as hot favourites - the juries had the song in twelfth place on the basis of an apparently much better dress rehearsal performance.

4) Italy's surprise second place was courtesy of the juries - in fact, if it had been a jury-only vote, Italy would have been the landslide winners.  In the public vote, they were only eleventh.

5) On a couple of songs which I didn't think I got the results they deserved : the juries were far more appreciative that the public of the Austrian entry, but the opposite was true of Spain.

6) I'm relieved to see that the rumours suggesting the tedious Swedish entry had won the televote were wrong, albeit only just.  With the juries, it was a mere ninth.

So on balance I think this shows that the juries are having a positive effect, even though they've clearly failed to wholly eradicate the political effect on the final placings.

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