From The Land Of Shakespeare Another Cucumber

Michael Hedges September 16, 2013 Follow on Twitter

It’s called the silly season and everybody understands. Those last weeks of summer with newsmakers still on retreat and journalists stumbling back to their desks are a challenge for editors. It’s the time sea monsters rise, UFOs fly and even the least consequential events warrant special coverage.

There is a new scandal with the Eurovision Song Contest, reported the tabloids. Quoting mostly the anonymous, often sourced from other tabloids and gossip sites, the Mail Online (Daily Mail – September 13) revealed that fixers with cash have been roaming the Eurovision Song Contest “for years.” Oh dear, what’s this world coming to? British media people have made careers railing about the Eurovision Song Contest. Danes refer to silly season headlines as agurketid, cucumber news.

The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), for those uninitiated, is the annual live televised music extravaganza in which singers sing and viewers vote for winners. TV channels participating are dues paying members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), public broadcaster’s trade association. Typically, those broadcasters hold national contests to select a representative. Sometimes they just name somebody. World-wide audience for the semi-final and final broadcasts have been estimated between 100 million and 150 million, easily rivaling big sporting events.

One hook to the ESC is selecting the host venue. With only a few exceptions, the country represented by one year’s winning singer has become host of the next. Certain value accrues to that country’s public broadcaster; a little cash from event add-ons and local sponsors trumped by exposure to a huge audience and an army of journalists covering it all.

This public relations bonus has added a competition beyond songs and music. Officials in host countries have seized the opportunity, spending lavishly on new venues and facilities as they might for World Cup football or the Olympic Games. After Azeri singers Ell and Nikki won in 2011, the subsequent host city would be Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, and the government moved forward on a major construction project – the Crystal Palace venue. Human rights and media watchers criticized the EBU after news reports of large scale evictions to prepare the venue site and continuing revelations of press freedom violations. EBU Director General Ingrid Deltenre took the unprecedented step of organizing a “conference on media freedom in Azerbaijan” with rights watchers and Azeri government officials to assuage critics.

It was then at or around the Malmö, Sweden venue for this past year’s ESC that an “anonymous delegation member,” recalled to Swedish newspaper Skanska Dagbladet (September 8), was offered “enough money to live on for a year” by an unnamed member of the Azeri delegation to vote appropriately. This anonymous delegation member also said there had been an approach from a Macedonian delegation representative to swap votes.

ESC voting has changed in recent years, largely under pressure from legacy EBU members, their entries falling far below expectation. Rather than rely on telephone – now SMS – votes from viewers entirely a jury of “music professionals” has had 50% of the outcome decision since 2009. Since 2000, contestants from seven Eastern European countries (including Turkey and Azerbaijan) have won the ESC and seven from Western Europe, singers from Denmark winning twice.  

EBU Event Manager Sietse Bakker expressed skepticism about the reports of vote buying or offers thereof, in a follow-up interview with Skanska Dagbladet (September 9), something the Daily Mail missed. “Because we were so tired of unfounded speculation, we asked the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to interview ten heads of mission in Malmö this year.” Auditors, he said, “have never observed any irregularities.”

The original Skanska Dagbladet article suggested, though not explicitly, that the Malta delegation might have sold votes to favor the Azeri contestant in Malmö. Public broadcaster PBS CEO Anton Attard called that “the result of wild extrapolation from the initial claims,” quoted by the Malta Independent (September 13). He also noted that Azeri singers have “made it a point to visit Malta over the past few years.”

ESC voting – rules, blocks and challenges notwithstanding – is very much part of the show. People like to see where each country’s vote goes. And even more so in the age of social media, all quite well integrated into the television ambiance.

Still, rustling among EBU members continues. Morocco’s State broadcaster SNRT confirmed it would not be returning the ESC in 2014 but maybe another time. Singer Samira Ben Said competed in 1980, placing 18th, and Morocco, the only North African country to participate, hasn’t sent a contestant since. Andorra’s national broadcaster RTVA will also not participate, citing financial reasons.

Turkish State broadcaster TRT may not participate in 2014, said General Director Ibrahim Sahin, because of the voting rules. “When the SMS votes started pouring in, Turkey made the top ten in the ranking,” he said, quoted by Todays Zaman (September 15), complaining about the 50% weighting of the jury vote. Turkish singer Sertab Erener won the ESC in 2003 and the event was hosted in Istanbul the following year. TRT did not participate in the Malmö ESC

The 2014 ESC will be held in Copenhagen. Most of the usual participants are busily choosing their next contestants. Thankfully, the silly season for this year is drawing to a close.

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