This has been one of the bigger stories today, the Eurovision scoring system is having a massive overhaul. Rather than having countries mark in the Strictly Come Dancing style, where the jury vote and the popular vote are ranked separately and combined to give a final vote tally, this year each country will give two separate sets of points – a jury vote and a televote – effectively doubling the number of points on offer. In theory this means that influence is still 50/50 between juries and televoters, but it’s calculated in a different, apparently fairer way. A song that does well with the jury but bombs with the televote, or vice versa, should now be able to pick up points where previously the disparity may have left it outside a country’s top ten picking up nothing.
How will this be represented on the night? The Eurovision site suggests that the jury votes will be read out 1-12 in the traditional manner. After all the juries have declared the points earned from all the country’s televotes combined will be revealed starting with the song which scored the least, so if Germany let’s say scored 7 points in the French televote, 5 points in the Belgian televote and 1 pt from the UK televote they would get 13 points added to their jury score to get their final total, whereas a country that does very well, like the UK, might get a big wodge like 276 points just added to their jury score towards the end. You won’t have to sit through all the countries declaring again, it’ll all come at once.
Why do this? The official line is that it will make the voting more exciting on the night. Previously, even with algorithms, there will always be a pull-away point where the winning song is the clear winner in the voting. Using the patented Big Wodge system nobody will quite sure until right up to the end.
Why full jury results and not full televote results when that’s likely to be of more interest? Fair question. My take is that having the night finish on the whim of half a billion people is more dramatic than finishing the night on the whims of around 200 jury members. The televote scoring will still be available online after the show.
Sweden’s Melodifestivalen (their Eurovision selection process) has successfully used variations of the Big Wodge system for almost twenty years, but it works slightly differently to how it’s being used for Eurovision. Under their current rules the televote is converted into a percentage and songs receive that percentage of the points (equal to the amount of points the juries can give). Of course this couldn’t work like for like for Eurovision where countries can’t vote for themselves and each country has a different population.
Tl;dr?
For anyone confused by the new Eurovision voting system, I've put together this handy diagram. pic.twitter.com/ruTrx5L1tQ
— Jonathan Cresswell (@JonathanEx) February 18, 2016
My biggest issue right now really is that it sounds like Annoying Spokespeople are only going to announce who gets 12 points, which makes the satellite link-ups hardly seem worth bothering with.
Also reading the suggestion that spokespeople are going to be coached by SVT so as to not be annoying.
Reading out the points isn’t the bit that takes the time, it’s the “hello, hi, how are you, lovely show” bit!
I’m still very concerned that it’ll be 90 minutes of build up, vote allocation, then BOOM ACTUALLY THIS COUNTRY HAS WON FOOLED YOU ALL SORRY EVERYONE ELSE.
I agree that something needs to be done as the voting has been a bit stale and one sided recently. I’m intrigued to see how this plays out… but my gut says this isn’t the right way to do it.
I think I’m fine with that to be honest, in the spirit of “keep everyone involved for as long as possible” (the Big Wodge bonus was also one of the credos behind the never-been-bettered Fantasy Big Brother/X Factor passim I used to run). The results are the results, there are only so many ways you can hide the inevitable.
“I’m still very concerned that it’ll be 90 minutes of build up, vote allocation, then BOOM ACTUALLY THIS COUNTRY HAS WON FOOLED YOU ALL SORRY EVERYONE ELSE.”
Well the opposite of that is 90 minutes of build up, vote allocation then BO-oh.
For this to be exciting there needs to be reasonable and significant difference in opinion between juries and televoters.
Couldn’t they tape the annoying spokesperson beforehand? The juries vote a day prior to the event and it’s probably a lot cheaper than satellite link-ups. Although you would lose a lot of that eurovision feel.
I think I like the change if it is represented well. To me it sounds really not suspensive with that big wodge reveal, but if they can pull it off, I welcome that.
The interesting argument I’ve read is that last year Sweden won the contest, won the jury vote but came third in the televote.
In theory the suspense here is knowing that Sweden are top but the two countries yet to have their points are revealed are the two countries that we KNOW have scored more than you. Have they done enough?
I think it could work- but the presentation would be key. I’d do it one country at a time like normal, until you get down to the final three or four countries. Then you show the point totals that were handed out to them, but not who got what. Ideally you would have the current leader, then the final three or four possibilities depending on how the numbers shook out; cue the dramatic music and the numbers shuffling between the countries on the big screen, then reveal them all at once.
I suspect the other reason they’re doing the jury votes normally is because San Marino doesn’t have a televote (it doesn’t have its own phone network, so the televotes cast there count as votes from Italy), and the jury is the backup if something major happens (like the Dutch fireworks factory that blew up on the day of the contest in 2000). But then you get into issues with how you handle the annual micronation juries that get disqualified because they all conveniently had the same exact results.
Another thought is that the televotes are often neighbor-vote based (we all know Greece is going to get 12 from Cyprus and vice versa no matter what happens, for example), whereas the juries are allegedly more objective because their based off the dress rehearsal and thus less predictable to announce live. whether this actually is the case remains to be seen though. I feel this will either do well, or we’ll be back to the old format pretty quickly.
In unlikely revival news, CBBC are bringing back Copycats with Sam and Mark after a four year hiatus:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/shows/copycats_march16
Really dumb change IMO which makes the best hour of the contest practically pointless – it’ll just be a case of tune in at the end to see who’s won like with X Factor/Strictly.
There is also far less viewer satisfaction from one spontaneous moment to actually the slow realisation of the acts that they’re out in front and likely to win. It’s nice to see that lead build and the acts, presenters and commentators all unable to do some basic maths to work out they’ve actually won. All they need to change is actually confirming the winner at the point they’ve won – they used to leave it to the end and really it makes a better show to do that, letting the viewers feel a bit smug that they know the last few votes are pointless rather than outright telling them the last few votes are pointless.
I think it will take seeing it in practice to form a final opinion. I’m not convinced about it on paper, it seems to make the spokesperson a bit redundant and seems like it will involve a lot of time spent revealing the jury votes, and the not nearly as much time on the televote reveal even though they have equal weight number-wise and arguably the televote has more weight in terms of what’s interesting to the viwer.
That being said, I like that it means a better ‘reveal’ at the end, and that it somewhat masks the ‘neighbourly’ voting by bundling it all together.
“I think it will take seeing it in practice to form a final opinion.”
This is the boringly reasonable and correct opinion, I suspect. It’ll be jarringly odd this year and goodness knows how they’re going to explain it to the average viewer, but the Swedes take the Eurovision very seriously (despite also, gasp, taking the piss out of it) so I’m more than happy to see how it plays out in reality before coming to a final opinion.
Speaking of Eurovision, here was one of Finland’s potential entries this year. Not through to next week’s final round, unfortunately.
Right, all being well this should work. This has got me quite interested so I’ve put together a spreadsheet from 2015’s result but with the new system applied. It doesn’t affect Sweden winning although it does do some re-arranging of the final result based on my workings out.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MYgfaPNaU5Pck8ZKBcyn-AwKtLl32eZCwmUtZc4SSQ4/edit?usp=sharing
Interestingly, it moves us from 4th to last to just plain last place.
My one final observation, as they hosts will announce the televotes country-by-country starting with the lowest, presumably that means we will actually hear the Eurovision catch-phrase “Nul Points” said if one of the songs gets nothing from the televote?
It did cut into the margin of victory at least percentage-wise (In the actual 2015 results Sweden was about 20.5% ahead of 2nd place Russia. If they used the 2016 rules last year, Sweden would have beaten 2nd place Italy by about 16.7%). But a runaway winner will be a runaway winner..
In fairness I don’t think the point of this is to provide a closer contest, just to make the result reveal a bit more legitimately tense.
Basically, Brig has single-handedly brought Eurovision to its knees.
With MASSIVE viewers!