It’s only recently come to my attention that controversy has surrounded Germany’s entry into Eurovision 2016. This is the kind of thing that I would normally have kept you up-to-date on well-before this. My apologies for the oversight.
Actually, I hadn’t realized until now that I’d not even written anything about last year’s Eurovision 2015 competition. We were travelling a bunch around that time, I guess. But Chris and I actually watched the semi-finals on our laptops last year, as we were in a room without a TV. We didn’t see the complete final “live” (on the laptop), though, as we opted that evening to dine out and have a spectacular Italian seafood meal at our favorite restaurant, rather than sit at home and watch the Eurovision 2015 finals.
I know, I know, priorities. What can I say.
Anyway, this year’s contest is now less than 2 months away, and I guess most of the countries have picked their entries by now, including Germany. For each of the past few years, Germany has been holding a TV contest to pick their entry. However, as readers of my old blog might recall, that system hit an unexpected snag when the winner – who was incredibly popular with the audience the night of the contest – declined to perform at Eurovision and withdrew from the contest just after he won. It was all quite strange. The loser then became the new winner – i.e. the singer who was NOT popular with the German song contest audience got sent to Eurovision. Unfortunately, she went on to crash and burn rather spectacularly at Eurovision, when she and her song were “awarded” the dreaded NULL points. I.e., she scored zero points. Eurovision 2015 wound up being a big disaster for Germany all the way round.
So for the 2016 contest, the Germany organizers perhaps very sensibly decided to ditch the contest idea and just have a committee pick their 2016 entry without holding a contest.
Now, other countries do this, including England. But it hasn’t worked out well for England — recent Eurovision results for England’s entries have been less than stellar. The use of a secret committee to pick the entry had actually become a bit of a sore point in England, to the point where this year England switched to holding a contest.
Which is, as I’ve said, what Germany used to do. But after last year’s debacle, a committee got together and selected a singer (and a song) to send to Eurovision 2016. They announced their selection — and then all hell broke loose. The singer turned out to be rather notoriously racist, sexist, xenophoic, homophobic … well, you get the idea. Not exactly a great choice to send to a contest that celebrates the idea of uniting the world through song.
So, the committee withdrew their selection, and then announced they’d have a contest after all. The winner turned out to be a 17-year old girl who had previously won the German version of a TV-show contest called The Voice, and she’s going to sing a song in English called Ghost.
Personally, the song isn’t my cup-of-tea, but I put it on and listened to it in the background as I typed up this post. Then – as they say in all the click-bait headlines on the Internet — something weird happened. I actually thought I’d clicked on the wrong thing and was listening to a song from a couple of years ago called Only Teardrops. Ghost sounds that similar to me. If you watch the videos you might not heard the similarities at first. But they are darn similar if you just listen to them without getting distracted by the the odd staging used for each song.
Anyway, Only Teardrops won it all back in 2013. So does Germany have more than a Ghost of a chance of winning this year?
Stay tuned…
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Song links:
- Ghost, Germany’s 2016 entry
- Only Teardrops, Denmark’s winning 2013 entry
- Cake to Bake, Latvia’s Eurovision 2014, and my all-time favorite of the recent shows
— OK, this one has nothing to do with anything else in this post, but I wanted to leave you with a cute song to end on, so those other ones don’t get stuck in your head.
You’re welcome.