Intro Post

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A few days ago, I got a ticket for the Eurovision 2024 second semifinal itself! Not just a rehearsal, but the actual show. And I’ll be sitting right next to my friend Liv in the arena, which is extra cool. I also have a ticket to the evening rehearsal for semifinal 1, which means I’ll see all 37 songs live in person. I’m really excited about this trip, but I’m also worried about encountering protests related to Israel’s participation. Though the contest would’ve had less drama if Israel skipped out this year, I’ve made peace with the fact that they’re participating.

Anyway, enjoy the third shortest post in my Eurovision blog! The only shorter ones are my reviews of 1957 and 1958.

Introduction

For their third time hosting Eurovision, Denmark once again chose its trusty capital city of Copenhagen, fittingly across the straits of last year’s host city of Malmö. The best option for a building to host turned out to be a former shipyard on what was once an industrial island, which was transformed into “Eurovision Island” for the sake of this contest. Other options included a boxy arena in a small town called Herning, an impromptu tent by the Danish broadcaster’s headquarters, and a former prison. I think if this was a 20th century contest, DR would’ve probably chosen Herning, but these days there are so many tourists that visiting in a small town just can’t work out. Either way, they had no choice but to choose an unusual location! Leave it to the Danes to do something weird and unconventional.

This year featured a lineup of 37 countries: Poland and Portugal returned from last year, whereas Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, and surprisingly Cyprus skipped out. Poland was able to return because the EBU abolished the rule that a country could only join if they had broadcast the previous grand final. As they’ve done many years, Bosnia and Herzegovina originally wanted to participate but then changed their mind. This means this will be even shorter than my previous semifinal post, with only 11 songs.

The voting system was mostly the same as 2013, but to prevent the voting scandals that happened that year, all the juries had to agree to have their names and full rankings publicly released, and they could not consist of anyone who was part of the past two years’ juries. In the semifinals, six countries either had their televotes malfunction or not enough votes to be counted as valid, so their results had to be 100% jury. The rest used a hybrid of jury and televote. I should also note that Denmark went back to three hosts this year, this time two men and one woman.

Watching the 2013 final with my friend Liv was so much fun, now I can never go back to watching the contest alone (though I’ll still rewatch the songs alone, to collect my thoughts better). I hope you don’t mind her name popping up a lot! We watched the semifinals with German commentary. I wanted to try British commentary at first, but I don’t really like those semifinal commentators. They’re mostly just talking to each other and they talk over the hosts a lot.