Tim: Split voting, televote vs jury, is always tricky, as we found out yesterday, and there’s no real perfect way of sorting it, though I’d say Sweden comes closest with its splitting the whole 270 televotes points down by percentage and giving equal weight to public and jury.
In contrast, Romania’s system gave this one, which scraped two thirds of all public votes, 12 points, and then the next one 10, despite it barely scraping 20%.
Tom: Ouch, that’s harsh. Of course, perhaps the idea is to minimise the chance of a Runaway Public Winner outweighing the expert opinion?
Tim: Add that to the fact that there were six jurors who each had the same points level as the whole public combined, and this easily got knocked back.
Tom: Huh. Maybe the idea is just to use the public as a tiebreaker.
Tom: For the first half of this, I’d written “the jury members are probably right”, because I couldn’t see why the public went for it. And then… well.
Tim: Curious structure, here, perhaps forced upon it by the relative calm for much of it, with us completely missing out the second chorus and middle eight and instead jumping straight to that lovely key change. Sometimes I’d complain, but when you’ve only got three minutes to play with it’s understandable, and it’s actually quite nice when people break the rules a bit.
Tom: And when they have such a spectacular voice. I don’t know why I think this works: the first half is slow and dull, the operatic vocals should be just ridiculous, but somehow — and I think this is down to the performer — I can see this doing really well, in the way that extremely competent, extremely noticable tracks do sometimes at Eurovision.
Tim: Also, of course, it helps that so much of what we do have is so good. In the first chorus there’s the shock value of ‘oh, so that’s what we’re doing’, which allows us to skip past the fact that it’s relatively damp. There’s that slight beat coming for the second verse, and then, yeah, that key change, the proper use of her impressive voice and then that backing chanting to bring everything to a climax. So, if someone could have a word with TVR about how democracy works, that’d be great, cheers.