Robertson's Reflection
Exactly one month after Junior Eurovision, we have the full breakdown of votes revealed from the EBU. On the face of it there are few surprises, Malta and Armenia were run away first and second places with both the juries and the televoters and scored top points from the vast majority of countries. It’s always nice to see as well that every song not just scored points on the Saturday night, but also scored points from jury groups and from televote groups. We are yet to see a JESC nul points so to speak.
However the time to look back and focus on Junior Eurovision for the fun of it has been and gone. Now comes the time we use Junior Eurovision as our testing ground for the many hypotheses we have in the bigger Eurovision Song Contest.
One obvious example is that from Australia’s debut. Before the Contest I was concerned that the predominantly Eastern European countries taking part in Junior would not warm to Australia as much as their fifth place in Vienna suggested. The final result of Bella Paige’s 8th is perfectly fine for the land Down Under, but the televoting did crash and burn ‘My Girls’ into a 13th place. Even I as a non-fan of the song would say that was undeserved. There were 10 televoting points from Malta, and 6 from Bella’s diaspora home country of Macedonia, but also zeroes from Ukraine, Russia and bizarrely even Ireland and Italy with the home viewers. The Australian gimmick doesn’t automatically mean televoters will flock each time to vote and they need to be cautious in predicting success every year. Now needing to qualify from the Semi Final, Junior Eurovision shows that it’s not going to be a run-in-the-park for the Aussies.
It also provided a key indicator on how well the Eastern bloc voting can spread with the inclusion of Russian-born Kamilla Ismailova representing San Marino. San Marino’s 9th place in the televoting is a highlight for the microstate, but mainly bolstered by Kamilla’s small yet significant fame out east. 5 points from Belarus, 10 points from Russia and 12 points from Ukraine of a total 51 show some loyal support filtering above the low scores. Noteworthy might even be 4 televoting points from Armenia (where the jury ignored San Marino) meaning Armenia awarded 2 points to ‘Mirror’. Kamilla after all being half-Azeri. Note here two things, one, that Junior Eurovision has powers above and beyond political issues that hold Eurovision back and two, that the Soviet bloc is strong and loyal and there are lots of 12s awaiting Lazarev in Stockholm.
Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that there are still those songs that split the juries and televotes. The Dutch result of third last caused a sad shift away from songwriting for one of Junior’s most loyal entrants, but had huge splits between jury and televote. ‘Million Lights’ was pleasant, musically pleasing but not anybody’s number one that I spoke to. It must have been somebody’s, with 9 televoting points in total, but the safe and inoffensiveness scored many low points from jurors and resulted in 9th place on their scoring. That kind of song may, with a full ranking system, get enough support to hop over the qualification line, but would be destroyed in a full Saturday night of 20+ entries. Italy’s ‘Viva’ was another example of this effect (scored three ‘maybes’ in Juke Box Jury for its blandness) which we all know too well.
Hopefully we’ll see a Eurovision in May with less songs that slide off opinion, and more that make it the musically ground-breaking and thought provoking competition we all love.
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Photos from EBU (Vladimir Dudakliev) and RTSH
