Back from a long, long break and ESC18 thoughts

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Hello all, first off an apology!  The blog has been dormant for far too long.  I'm hoping to start writing regular posts even throughout the ESC off season (is there an off season?!)  If you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see covered in the blog, please leave a comment or contact me.

After seeing Portugal winning in 2017, I was hoping that a trend of voting on the quality of a song would emerge and we would start seeing some really good songs winning Eurovision.  Well, that didn't last very long did it?!

At the end of the day, the public voted in their masses for Netta, I can't help but think Eurovision took a step backwards when she won.  What is more worrying for me is that some really good songs and good quality singers didn't get rated well by so-called expert juries.  I understand that they still have to vote for songs they like, but surely the juries should be considering quality and structures of songs, quality of voice etc.  whether they like the genre of song or not.  Whilst the jury voting was slightly weird, it wasn't as bad as some of the public voting!   The voting has got better, but still needs looking at.

The semis didn't seem very balanced in quality of songs.  There were some good songs which didn't qualify from semi 1 due to the quality whereas some average songs got though in semi 2 because of the imbalance.

It will be interesting to see how Netta's win influences next year's contest.  Usually, you will see some countries trying to copy the previous year's winner in some way.  Hopefully, it won't mean that next year will be filled with gimmicky songs.

Having said that, well done to Netta and I hope she enjoys her success.

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