Eurovision Diaries
m-m-pr.com
m-m-pr.com
There is no single point of failure, there are two separate master control rooms, two separate sound mixing rooms, two separate electricity feeds, tens of thousands of kilometers of cables, all the microphones are dual connected on both analogue and digital wireless, ...
The cameras are pre-scripted and auto-switched, a bit like on auto pilot, but the operator can override them if needed:
There's a similar tech blog for last year [1], but it's sorely missing Ola's own funky style.
These have always been great reading for someone more used to being a tech than a guest at parties.
To no-one's surprise, they didn't capture the true genius of ESC, because they focused on the contest part, and they had a single body that evaluated all contestants. No, that's not what it's about.
Every country participating in ESC selects their contestant any way they want, without oversight or common rules or anything. This leads to the following:
1) Occasionally, a country will send a bat-shit crazy contestant.
2) For a given year, you have no idea which countries are sending serious contestants, and which countries are sending something bat-shit crazy.
3) Occasionally, a bat-shit crazy contestant wins.
Anyone can do a competition between competent, serious, contestant. Whatever. It's the crazy that gets people hooked on it.
Imagine the Olympics, but a few countries just say "fuck this shit" and send a team of monkeys in lycra instead of a team of athletes. Sometimes the monkeys win. That's Eurovision!
I've read these before. Really interesting diaries from the roaming team of mostly Swedes who have managed a surprisingly large portion of the technical production of the Eurovision Song Contest Finals TV broadcasts of the past ~decade as they happened in various countries.
There are a lot of pages to go through. Given the IA's seemingly eternal performance issues I recommend bookmarking this and going back to it a later point.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220510192834/https://m-m-pr.co...
Can't get anywhere with this link tho.