We have our first national final of the calendar year.
“YAY!”
It’s Belgium!
“Oh.”
Belgium doesn’t bring with it the best reputation for staging national selections. This is a country whose televised national finals over the years have given us a capella oddities and a man who really, really likes his mother. Meanwhile, most of their most successful acts have come from internal selections: think Urban Trad, Loic Nottet, Blanche, Tom Dice (Laura Tessoro being the notable exception). Leaving aside the results of the winners, Belgian national finals haven’t got the best reputation for high quality television and they make some unusual formatting choices.
This year they’ve outdone themselves in terms of quirky selection formats. The seven competing artists have each been required to submit two songs. Then every day in the week leading up to the contest, they will present their two songs to their fellow competitors and the people who are trying to beat them in the final show will advise them which song to take to the competition proper. I do quite enjoy it when a broadcaster comes up with a hilariously wonky format for a national selection. So to celebrate Belgium’s newest contribution to the genre, here are a few of my favourites.
Lithuania 2014-15
This is the Great Lithuanian Song Caroussel. In 2014, the selection started with 20 artists and 16 songs, with artist and song competing separately. The first few weeks took the form of a karaoke competition for the artists, before they eventually started singing some of the songs. Each week a different artist would sing their own version of one of the candidate songs. An artist would then get kicked out, as well as one or more of the songs. The following week the remaining acts would all swap songs and the process continued. The penultimate show of the series was used to select the song and then in the final, the three remaining artists would sing their version.
It’s such a strange way to pick a Eurovision entry. What if the best song/artist combination happens in week one, then the artist gets kicked out in week two after singing a ropey version of the worst song? I’m still a little aggrieved that, when the format was revived in 2015, they started the competing song section with an anthemic stadium rock version of “No More Tears by Tadas Juodsnukis, but the song was never performed the same way again (the tropical version from the following week was a disgrace).
The 2015 edition of the show is particularly notable for fans of national finals making things up as they go along. Amid rumours that two of the participants were getting to know each other after hours, LRT decided to add duets to the format and we ended up with Monika Linkyte and Vaidas Baumila performing This Time together in Vienna. Have you ever wondered, though, what would have happened if Monika had won a year earlier and decided to perform Lithuania’s 2014 entry as a lounge ballad? Well wonder no more. It’s a mystery how Attention made it all the way through the selection process.
Germany 2014
Germany loves a complicated national final. Unser Song für Dänemark involved eight artists with two songs each and was split into three rounds. In round one, each artist sang their first song, before the public voted to cut their number in half. Round two saw the four remaining artists sing their second song. A new period of voting then opened where viewers were invited to vote for their favourite of the eight songs performed by our remaining artists. The top two artists moved into a superfinal with their most popular song. If you’re the sort of person who needed to read that twice to follow what’s going on, German TV had you covered with a nice infographic at the start of the show.
These shows were actually really good tv. The quality of the songs was high and in 2014 they’d even convinced a big name to take part, with popular soft rock band Unheilig heavy favourites to get the ticket to Copenhagen. There was of course a slight catch. Only seven of the artists were picked directly by the broadcaster. The eighth made their way to the contest by an open submission process and then winning a wildcard “Club Concert” a couple of weeks before.
Setting up your show with seven established acts and one underdog was only ever going to end one way. The underdog, Elaiza came with a strong song in Is It Right and pipped Unheilig’s Wir Sind Alles Wie Eins to the title. They ended up being hung out to dry at Eurovision proper, with no staging to speak of and a spot in the running order immediately after Conchita. Despite all that, they still managed a creditable 18th place.
The format would survive another year, when the wildcard again got sent to Eurovision. Although on that occasion it was as runner up, after Andreas Kummert pulled out of Eurovision immediately after he was announced as winner.
Belgium 1983
Belgium are old hands at this. Another format with multiple songs per artist, this one. Nine artists took part, each with three songs. The artists were split into three groups: males, females and groups, and semi finals were held for each group where a jury chose their favourite song for each artist, leaving us with a nine song final. The acts were all fairly standard Eurovision fare, apart from experimental electronica collective Pas De Deux.. I love them, but they were definitely not the mainstream choice in 1983.
It’s not the multiple songs that really makes Eurosong 1983 stand out, though. It’s the incredibly odd way they decided to announce the points in the final. Eight jurors awarded their top four songs 1, 5, 7 and 10 points which they wrote on various coloured discs. The points are then awarded in ascending order: all the 1s first, then the 5s, the 7s and ending with 10s.
The favourite in the studio, Bert Kaell is in second as we come to the 10 pointers, but of course that just means he’s got a lot of lower scores. Pas De Deux storm up the table, coming from nearly last, to a clear win with six of the eight top scores. The weird electronica ones triumph! And the crowd goes mad with fury! Boos rain down all through the reprise, but we get one of the great 80s Eurovision songs. Some of the madness is shown at the start of this youtube video.
Belgium 1979
As I said, Belgium have a track record. In 1979, Flemish broadcaster BRT internally selected Micha Marah to be their representative for Jerusalem and organised a six-song national final to pick her entry. Somehow they managed to spin five weeks of television out of this material.
In show one, Micha performed all six songs and a public vote chose “Comment ça va?” first, “Hey Nana” second, “Mijn dagboek” third, while the sixth placed song was eliminated. Repeat this process for shows 2 and 3, in which we lose the 4th and 5th placed songs. In show 4, Micha got to pick one song to come back, which was duly eliminated a second time. This all leads up to a final between the three songs that had come in the top three every week, always in the same order.
The semis felt like a complete waste of time, but the final worked differently. This time the public vote was replaced by an expert jury. I’m sure you can guess the rest. That’s right, the jury chose not to pick the public favourite. They sent “Hey Nana” to Eurovision, despite it coming second with the public every time they were asked. Micha herself was known to dislike Hey Nana and didn’t even record it. Belgium finished joint last in Jerusalem.
Poland 2020
In 2020 Poland decided it would select its song using a special version of their karaoke talent show format Szansa na Sukces. It had already proved successful in picking a Junior Eurovision entrant, but it’s quite an odd environment for a national final. Three semis were comprised of seven singers, each performing a cover version that was apparently picked at random by pulling a glittery ribbon from the ceiling. The songs are performed full karaoke style, with the words all round the studio. Based on these performances, Gromee, Michał Szpak and Cleo would pick one finalist from each semi.
There was meant to be an option for our panel to award someone a wildcard to the final, but they must have seen enough, as they didn’t bother. The remaining 18 singers never got to sing their Eurovision song.
Curiously, one of the three finalists was Albert Cerny, lead singer of Lake Malawi from the Czech Republic. The producers had to relax their Polish nationality rules to allow him in. The final comprised another round of Eurovision karaoke, followed by them each singing their original song (words still on screen). Albert (who grew up by the Polish border and went to a Polish school) performed Lake Malawi’s song “Lucy” karaoke style and without his band, but missed out on the win. Alicja Szemplińska instead won public and jury vote, but, it being 2020, she never got to go to Eurovision proper.
Azerbaijan 2013
This is a classic. Azerbaijan had used singing show Milli Seçim Turu to select its artist in 2011 and 2012, but this was the first time the competition came with a proper song selection at the end, meaning this funny little competition got more attention from the fans than ever before.
Milli Seçim Turu was on every weeknight for eight weeks, with a fresh cast of eight or nine contestants every week. It’s a bit like Richard Osman’s House of Games. Every Monday, that week’s contestants would sing an international hit, on Tuesday they’d sing an Azerbaijani song, Wednesday was Eurovision day, Thursday was a song and dance routine and on Friday they picked their favourite song for the big finish. A weekly winner was chosen every Friday, who would progress to the national final proper.
Now, if you did the maths while I explained that, you’ll have noticed that this contest required a lot of people. A total of seventy singers lined up at the start of this show and Azerbaijan isn’t that big a country. This means the quality was variable, as was the performers’ command of the English language. Most of the singers were on safe ground with the Azerbaijani songs, but Eurovision day was a real adventure. You can go down a major rabbit hole with Milli Seçim Turu Eurovision covers.
Farid Mammadov ended up winning the show with Hold Me, but no one cares about that. This is Sebel Cəfərova’s legendary version of Euphoria. Poor girl, she gives it her best shot. I have to admire the way she throws herself at the task, despite the dodgy studio sound and her being only vaguely aware of what the words are meant to be. It’s glorious.
There are other national finals I could have picked. I could have gone for more Belgian ones, including the time the voting for the semi finals took a form similar to the football pools, where you voted for ten songs by post and if all ten made the final you could win a prize. I’m sure there are some corkers from back in the day that I’ve overlooked. Please let me know!
Thank You Europe 