Voting begins for the 2023 Eurovision song contest winner!
Voting has opened for the results of the 2023 Eurovision song contest. Here is a reminder of how it works:
The semi-finals were determined purely by public vote, but the Grand Final retains a jury plus public vote system. When the last song has played – Mae Muller’s I Wrote a Song – voting will open. After that there will be some music performances, and then we are into the nail-biting result process.
First we get points from the juries country by country, read out by a national representative, who usually takes slightly too long to do it, thus causing the show to overrun. After all of the jury scores are in, we have the half-time interim results table.
Then the public votes are added to each song in turn, starting with the song lying in 26th place. Songs can get up to 12 points from each country, and this year there is an additional set of points from “the rest of the world”, as the contest is open to anybody to vote. So songs popular with the public can literally add hundreds of points to their tally at a stroke, regardless of where the juries placed them.
The keen-eyed among you will spot that this means as we get closer to the top, songs in sixth, fifth, fourth place etc start leaping over the interim leader. But the interim leader is the last one to have their public points added, so you pretty much never know what the final result will be until there are only two or three more scores to be added.
Key events
Ewan Spence of the ESC Insight website, home of the unofficial Eurovision song contest podcast, told me earlier that Liverpool has embraced Eurovision like no other host city.
Everywhere you look is the logo, every song you hear is a Eurovision song (with a dash of The Beatles), and the Eurovision Village will be the biggest Eurovision party in the world.
And the delegations are in the middle of that, be it from organised tours, meeting fans in the various clubs, bars, and the massive Eurovillage, and a few are living out their dreams of playing in the Cavern Club. Even if it was at ten in the morning.
I’ve just been wanting to circle back to this because I still can’t find the words for what happened on the show during one of the interludes between the songs. Mel Giedroyc was churning behind Hannah Waddingham. It was incredible.
She was of course channelling one of the all-time great stage presentations, when Donatan & Cleo sang My Słowianie (We are Slavic) while doing a lot of churning, which for some reason, attracted a lot of the straight male and gay female vote.
I was working on a data-journalism site called Ampp3d in those days, and I remember doing a story that the UK’s jury had given them zero points, but the UK public had given them the top marks.
A great, great quote from the time from one of the judges: “I’d say it was soft porn. It was two boobs too far for me. I was shocked to see something like that on a family show.”
Sam Ryder is the interval act here, doing the obligatory “George Michael at the Olympics” and performing a new single instead of the one everyone wants to hear. Queen’s Roger Taylor is thumping the drums for him.
I love Sam Ryder though. His New Year’s Eve show blew Jools Holland’s effort out of the water.
Monika Cvorak
My colleague Monika Cvorak has been hosting a Eurovision watchalong, and this is her verdict on the night:
I know at this point it feels like 100 years ago, but I have to say I actually really enjoyed Spain, I thought it was so engaging and original, and the singer really gave it her all. It was the first time during the show that my Eurovision watch party attenders actually fell silent while watching the show, so that says something! Though I’m watching with a majority of people from Spanish-speaking countries, so that may have influenced it …
I also thought Albania was really good – so emotional and powerful. Loved it.
I know I said I don’t get the hype around Finland but I admit I sung and danced along to it so maybe I’m slowly becoming a convert … though maybe the daiquiri I served as a welcome drink helped with that!
Honorary mention to Norway: I thought the performance was a well-executed, textbook-energetic Eurovision crowd-pleaser and I’m thankful Norway delivered on that this year. But I’m slightly biased because I think they were robbed of the title in 2019 and I’m still waiting for justice.
I’m still in love with Moldova and Lithuania and if they do well I will be the happiest woman alive.
Also honorary mention to my home country of Slovenia because my friends are peer-pressuring me for not mentioning it in the preview (I still think the boys are cute but the song is boring though).
And sadly I’m still worried about the UK getting overall nul points … Let’s hope I’m wrong!
Phew. That’s the song bit over. It is always quite a scramble to follow that live and blog it! Thank you so much everybody for reading so far. And you’ve been perfectly lovely in the comments too.
I think it has been a really high standard this year, very few absolute duds. Sweden, Finland, Norway, the UK, France, Italy, Moldova or Israel would all seem like worthy winners to me.
Voting begins for the 2023 Eurovision song contest winner!
Voting has opened for the results of the 2023 Eurovision song contest. Here is a reminder of how it works:
The semi-finals were determined purely by public vote, but the Grand Final retains a jury plus public vote system. When the last song has played – Mae Muller’s I Wrote a Song – voting will open. After that there will be some music performances, and then we are into the nail-biting result process.
First we get points from the juries country by country, read out by a national representative, who usually takes slightly too long to do it, thus causing the show to overrun. After all of the jury scores are in, we have the half-time interim results table.
Then the public votes are added to each song in turn, starting with the song lying in 26th place. Songs can get up to 12 points from each country, and this year there is an additional set of points from “the rest of the world”, as the contest is open to anybody to vote. So songs popular with the public can literally add hundreds of points to their tally at a stroke, regardless of where the juries placed them.
The keen-eyed among you will spot that this means as we get closer to the top, songs in sixth, fifth, fourth place etc start leaping over the interim leader. But the interim leader is the last one to have their public points added, so you pretty much never know what the final result will be until there are only two or three more scores to be added.
It looks good, but will it be enough to go one step further than Sam Ryder last year?
26: ???????? United Kingdom: Mae Muller – I Wrote a Song
The UK got the last slot via a random draw. I really hope for her sakes this does well. It is a great little pop song, but whether it is as good as the other great little pop songs tonight I’m not so sure. She has thrown heart and soul into being the UK’s representative this year though, so, while acknowledging this is a blog for everyone, everywhere, I’ve got my fingers firmly crossed for her.
You will be seeing this on Eurovision clip shows for years. I love it. It is exactly the kind of thing that only Eurovision seems to be able to deliver on this global scale. It isn’t so much pop music as performance art. Let 3, I salute you!
It’s the hairy legs for me.
25: ???????? Croatia: Let 3 – Mama ŠČ!
THIS ON THE OTHER HAND. I was so pleased this got through the semi-final because it is proper WTF performance art Eurovision. They are a punk band who have been knocking around since the late 1980s and this is very clearly about war, with allusions to Vladimir Putin and the Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko, if in a rather surreal way. Incredible Eurovision stuff.
They are massive in Slovenia, but I don’t get what the flower power style has to do with the song, which is kind of sub-The Vamps boyband rock, and then some hideous air guitar gurning. Sorry. Really don’t like this one. Sometimes you just have to call it how you see it.
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