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We’re well into national final season now and holy fuck, we’re being absolutely SPOILED with all those native-language songs. As well as the return of Petra Mede as a host! The more native-language songs a contest has, the more likely one of them is to win. This is shaping up to be such an exciting year.
Introduction
After Turkey won the contest in 2003, the enormous city of Istanbul had the honor of hosting a very special edition of Eurovision. It was the first whose copyright belonged to the European Broadcasting Union rather than the host broadcaster, the first to use the standardized Euro♡ision logo, and most importantly, the first to take place over multiple evenings: a semifinal and a final. Featuring a whopping 36 countries, it was the largest Eurovision contest up to this point, even if you count the non-qualifiers from 1993 and 1996 as participants.
This contest featured all 26 countries that participated in 2003, all five countries that were relegated after 2002, one country (Monaco) we hadn’t seen since 1979, and four newcomers. The new guys in this contest were Albania, Andorra, Belarus, and Serbia and Montenegro (which I’ll refer to as S+M to avoid confusion with the two countries it would later split into). S+M is a special case because they participated in 1992 under the name Yugoslavia but were then kicked out due to the Yugoslav wars. Yugoslavia renamed itself to “Serbia and Montenegro” in 2003 and by that point, tensions with the rest of Europe were cooled down enough to let S+M into Eurovision.
Fourteen countries—the Big Four and the top ten non-Big Four countries from 2003—made it directly to the final. The other 22 countries had to compete in the semifinal for ten slots in the grand final. In this post, I’ll discuss the twelve entries that didn’t make it to the final.
Two more fun facts: This contest was the only one where the semifinal took place three days before the final, instead of two and/or four. And this was the only contest from 1999 and 2010 not to take place in a country’s capital.
Even though I said I’m not a fan of Peter Urban’s commentary, I’ve decided I’ll give him a chance this time. This means I’ll be watching both parts of this contest with German commentary.
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