Eurovision Rundown: 2021

After watching this year’s Eurovision I have quite a few things to say about it, so here’s a rundown of this year’s Eurovision:

Best Songs:

Germany’s entry was really corny, but I love it. The song is kind of a bop (and the corny-ness just makes it more fun), the lead singer could actually dance unlike a large number of the finalists and the whole thing was just really fun.

Iceland was wacky and cool. They had ironically bad dancing, weird instruments and cute sweaters, I mean what’s not to like?

Lithuania was weird, but also in a good way. They wore these weird yellow costumes and had a dance second to only Iceland in terms of how wacky it was.

Norway and Portugal were also quite cool. Portugal had great vocals and Norway very 80s.

Competition:

So now that we’ve talked about my favourite things that were weird in a good way, let’s talk about stuff that really wasn’t:

I got ads on chess.com of all places telling me to vote for Malta. I feel like that should be against the rules (Luckily Malta didn’t win, but they came depressingly close).

Speaking of things that should be against the rules, San Marino brought a prominent american pop star on stage as a “featured artist”. It was obviously and unashamedly a desperate attempt to get votes (which luckily failed). This goes against the whole point of Eurovision, which was created so people could get the feeling of national competition without war. They just slapped a San Marino flag on an american and it sure as hell didn’t appease any violent urges of mine.

Serbia was so bad it was hilarious, Belgium was cool but not a suitable song for Eurovision, Greece had some of the worst greenscreen I’ve seen all year, the UK managed to get 0 points all round and the swiss dude missed all his notes and generally messed up big time.

Voting:

Despite this, Switzerland was going to win Eurovision until the Televoting swooped in and saved the day, crowning Italy as the winner. Switzerland was getting a ridiculous amount of points from the National Juries; France was also getting quite a lot of points from them (but France was actually good).

 Almost everything to do with the juries is really un-transparent, including their judging criteria; and as a result they clearly don’t represent popular opinion: you can see for yourself the disparity between Jury votes and Televoting at www.eurovisionworld.com/eurovision/2021.  A clear example of how shady and lacking in transparency the juries are is that Greece gave their points to Cyprus and Cyprus gave their points to Greece (which feels pretty dubious and undermines confidence in the voting process). 

Serbia did better than Norway, Germany and the UK combined despite being one of the worst performances and songs all night.

Results:

Italy won with a rock song (in italian) followed by France and then Switzerland (both in french). None of the top three were in english. Due to Brexit I expected a shift away from english and for the UK to do badly, but not to this extent. 

Italy’s act was quite cool so I’m happy they won (and even happier that Switzerland didn’t), also they wore purple lederhosen, which is rather funky. France was quite good too but not my favourite. I still have no idea how Switzerland came third, while Germany was second last.

Despite all that it was still a very fun night, in no small part thanks to the elimination of some awful songs in the semifinals.