The Eurovision is bringing back the judges, but will it rob viewers of monster rockers and lesbian laments, asks Shane Hegarty
IN 1997, FIVE countries revolutionised the Eurovision Song Contest. That year, Austria, the UK, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland allowed their citizens to judge for the first time. The most obvious result? That the people loved Iceland's crotch-grabbing celebration of sado-masochism as much as the judging panels hated it. Change was in the air.
Over a decade later and it's finally been decided that democracy does not work. At least, not for the Eurovision. From 2009, the judging panels will return. In the intervening years, Austria and Monaco have withdrawn from the competition, in disgust at how televoting has led to so-called eastern European "bloc voting". Germany has consistently struggled. The Brits believe their miserable results are punishment for the Iraq war. And Ireland - second behind the UK in 1997 - this year sent Dustin the turkey to the contest. He groped in search of new Europe's cultural pulse, only to step on its fingers.
The public will still be able to vote alongside judging panels, which are being touted as an expert corrective to the people's bias. Yet, there is some irony in how the public, despite being so politically and geographically corrupted, has helped to make it a better contest. Iceland's 1997 entry turned out to be a predecessor of the sexed-up pop explosions that followed. As a result, the contest is visually more spectacular. And the public has chosen some fine winners, including exuberant ethnic pop (Turkey, 2003), engaging monster metal (Finland, 2006), and a Romany's lesbian lament (Serbia, 2007).
The return of the judging panels may prove to be bad news for the contest, but it also poses a challenge to the surprising amount of academics who use the Eurovision voting as a way to extrapolate international relationships in the modern era. Several research papers now come with splatters of Venn diagrams that look like demented dance steps but actually represent voting patterns.
However, such research was ongoing before televoting, and it showed that voting blocks were always an issue. One 1995 paper, for instance, went as far as to suggest that a link between the Low Countries and the Jewish diaspora in medieval times had manifested itself centuries later in a Eurovision voting pact between Israel and the Netherlands. Voting blocks were so common that researchers refer to the "western hegemony" that prevailed for decades before the current "eastern hegemony".
However, attempts at correcting the imbalance might have little to do with rescuing the Eurovision's artistic credibility, and more to do with cash concerns. The countries that have suffered most in the televoting era - Germany, France, the UK, Spain - also happen to be the biggest financial contributors to its organisers, the European Broadcasting Union. The return of the juries, though, may mean that viewers in western Europe can look forward to a return to the good old days, when there may have been a hegemony, but at least it was our hegemony.
