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Today, Slovenia confirmed that their Eurovision entry in 2024 will be sung in Slovenian for the third year in the row. France already released their entry, which is entirely in French, and I’d be very surprised if Marina Satti doesn’t sing in Greek. Why, in the name of all things holy, can’t Germany be like this???
Right after I published this post, the full list of participating countries for 2024 was released, even though Romania is still up in the air. I suppose the EBU decided that once they reached 37 participants, the same number as 2023, they’d go “screw it, let’s release the list already”.
Introduction
“The Irish pretend they don’t want to win this. Ahh, it’s too expensive! Ahh, we’re fed up with it! I’m Irish too, and don’t believe a word of it. The Irish love winning this, they love having it here.” As shown by the dramatic opening film, Terry Wogan’s words ring truer than ever.
Eurovision 1997 took place in Dublin, Ireland at the Point Theatre for one last time. This time, they went for a smaller stage, presumably so it wouldn’t seem like the same building. The contest featured two major changes to the rules. First, entries were now allowed to be sung entirely over a backing track without needing mimed instruments on stage, which was the biggest and last blow to the orchestra before it was abolished entirely. Second, five countries got their points from televoting for the first time: Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, and the UK. This was a trial round before almost all countries adopted televoting in 1998.
This time, the relegation system worked a bit differently: countries were allowed in based on their average scores from 1993 to 1996, which is still kind of a dumb system. It would take until 2004 for Eurovision to stop punishing countries for their previous low scores. Fortunately, the number of participants was bumped up to 25, which meant five countries returned (Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Russia) and only three were relegated (Belgium, Finland, Slovakia). This was Italy’s first appearance in Eurovision since 1993, and their last until 2011.
Fun fact: This was the first year where Peter Urban commentated for Germany, which he did up to 2023 (except in 2009). Unfortunately, I don’t like his commentary style. He sounds very monotone, like he’s reading from a script. So instead, I watched it with British commentary—fitting because the UK won for the most recent time. Buckle up, my dear readers: we’re almost done with the native language era of Eurovision.
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